The circus is a place of fun, adventure and laughter – when it doesn’t contain performing animals that is. Unsurprisingly the rest of London agrees, and have voted in a Time Out poll to have animal circuses banished to the history books forever.

According to the poll results that landed in my inbox today, 73% of people say performing animals is a cruel practice and just 8% defended it. The other 19% went to ‘Who needs the circus when we’ve got Boris?’ which made me chuckle.

Read a past entry of mine that shows why we shouldn’t allow ringmasters to go anywhere near animals. Scandal certified.

If you want a good chuckle, you have to listen to an interview with ringmaster Martin Lacey that went out on BBC Radio Nottingham last week. The journalist conducting the interview was physically and verbally assaulted when he made the mistake of referring to the Great British Circus’ camels as “tethered”. In a random explosion of expletives, Lacey launches into a tirade of abuse and at one point tells the radio journalist, “I think you’d better f**k off and not come back again.”

Well… there you go. We already knew that circuses which use animals are bad news but now we know a little more about the type of people who run them.

Animals forced to perform degrading tricks in circuses lead a life of misery. Animals such as tigers, camels and horses are confined to cages, trained using fear and pain as motivation and made to act in completely unnatural ways in front of spectators every night.

Listen to the interview in full, or a shortened ‘bleeped’ version at the Captive Animals’ Protection Society (CAPS) website. Be warned, it’s not for the faint hearted!

Image: Guardian Series / Creative Commons