Longtime Waukegan resident Mayor William Durkin, 71, said Wednesday he’s pretty sure the last time a traditional three-ring circus visited the city was during his childhood.
So Durkin and other city officials weren’t surprised when the Sterling & Reid Bros. Circus show, scheduled for Friday and Saturday in Waukegan, piqued some interest. The surprise came in a letter Durkin received Monday from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
The national animal rights group said the city would be violating an amended ordinance it passed Aug. 7, 1997, by allowing the circus to perform there. The 1997 Waukegan City Council action said elephants, which Sterling & Reid includes in its show, fall under the definition of dangerous animals in a city ordinance regulating their presence in public places.
According to the ordinance, “no person shall permit any dangerous animal to run at large, nor lead any such animal with a chain or rope or other appliance in any street or public place, whether such animal is muzzled or not.”
But Durkin said that law does not apply to circuses and was passed in response to an incident several years ago in which a local store promoted business by offering rides on an elephant in the shop’s parking lot.
“I don’t know how this is any different,” Debbie Leahy, spokeswoman for Norfolk, Va.-based PETA, said Wednesday, adding that Sterling & Reid offer elephant rides.
Leahy said PETA did not plan to demonstrate at the performances.
Representatives of Sterling & Reid could not be reached for comment Wednesday. The telephone number at Sterling & Reid company headquarters in Sarasota, Fla., was out of service Wednesday.
Durkin said the city was confident enough there was no conflict with the ordinance that, on Wednesday afternoon, it completed financial arrangements with Sterling & Reid to use a city parking lot at Grand Avenue and County Street for the show.
“There’s always going to be some people who are going to protest something,” Durkin said.
But while PETA has been marginalized by many for tactics such as throwing red paint on fur coats, the case against using elephants in circuses–based on public safety and animal cruelty concerns–has attracted growing support in the mainstream.
This month, for example, a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee is scheduled to hold a hearing on the proposed Captive Elephant Accident Prevention Act, which has 45 co-sponsors and is the first federal proposal to address the welfare of elephants in captivity and public safety. It would outlaw the interstate transport of the animals, effectively eliminating them from traveling circuses.
Closer to home, in Woodstock, the City Council amended the town’s animal control ordinance last year by prohibiting activities in which animals are forced to perform through the use of various “devices” that cause injury, pain or death.
Animal advocates said the measure would discourage circus acts in the town.
Helping galvanize support for the elephant cause, Leahy said, are highly publicized tragedies in recent years–many of them captured on videotape–in which circus elephants went berserk and killed or injured their trainers or other onlookers.
In January, an elephant killed a 52-year-old woman in a Florida circus family that provides wild animals for circus shows.
And, in 1994, a rampaging circus elephant killed a trainer and injured a dozen people in Honolulu before she was shot down in the street.
