According to the official website, Cirque Du Soleil is a flashy, “dramatic mix of circus arts and street entertainment” while a circus itself publically entails cotton candy, clowns and nothing other than fun. It is what goes on behind the scenes of these ostentatious performances that is atrociously and conspicuously hidden behind the curtains and the smiling face-painted clowns. Circuses make their profits from the customer’s satisfaction in the show. A customer’s satisfaction comes from seeing the unusual, witnessing the seemingly impossible and making believe what they never thought they would. Flexible humans, trapeze artists and performing animals are usually the highlights. The humans in the shows choose to use their own talents to earn themselves their livelihood, while the animals are forced to act in specific ways with absolutely no benefit to themselves except for the possibility of not getting abused for tor disobeying. As we saw in Earthlings, human elephant trainers in the circus clan are emotionally and physically abusive to their students. They yell and hit the elephants simply because they can and they feel superior over them, which is an interesting concept to me because the elephant is so much larger physically than the human. Animals that are taken on the road with circuses are treated with little to no regard to their health by their caretakers.
These animals are meant to be living in the wild and when they are held in small cargo trains for weeks at a time, they develop captivity-induced health problems that are linked to lack of proper exercise and prolonged chaining around their necks and ankles (according to http://www.animalrightsflorida.org/Circus.htm). In Sewell’s Black Beauty, Beauty is taken from her world of natural kindness and thrown into a new world with complete and utter ignorange and carelessness of his sufferings and pains all alone, with “No other creature…” besides the misogynistic human (27).
. Beauty is referred to as a steam engine and is not assigned a single attribute of a living species. “…if you don’t want to lame your horse, you must look sharp and get them out quickly. This foot is very much bruised…if I might advise, sir, you had better drive him gently for a while; the foot is a good deal hurt, and the lameness will not go off directly. ‘…When he was gone, my driver began to flop the reins about, and whip the harness, by which I understood that I was to go on, which of course I did, glad that the stone was gone, but still in a good deal of pain. This was the sort of experience we job-horses often came in for”(28). Although beauty got a rock stuck in her shoe and was clearly injured, her driver continued to push him, disregarding any pain that he may have because the driver simply desires to press forward. Animals that are under the control of ignorant humans forces them to shape their own mindset in order to handle their awful circumstances. “There was a great deal of bargaining; of running up and beating down , and if a horse may speak his mind so far as he understands, I should say there were more lies told, and more trickery at the horse fair, than a clever man could give an account of” (32). Sewell portrays Beauty as having superior intelligence to the abusive humans. Animals like Beauty are put through outrageous pain and sorrow because their masters are selfish and boorish to the idea that animals have physical and mental capacities equal to or superior to many individuals of the human race.
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