When Children See Animals In A Circus,

I Believe That In This New World That We Live In, We Often Have A Responsibility, You Know, To Actually Go Beyond The Thou Shalt Nots - That Is, The Not Harming Others - And Say We Can Help Others And We Should Be Helping Others.

Take For Example Providing A Guide Dog For A Blind Person. That's A Good Thing To Do, Right? All Right. It Is A Good Thing To Do. But You Have To Think What Else You Could Do With The Resources. It Costs About $40,000 To Train A Guide Dog And Train The Recipient So That The Guide Dog Can Be An Effective Help To A Blind Person. It Costs Somewhere Between 20 And $50 To Cure A Blind Person In A Developing Country If They Have Trachoma. So You Do The Sums, And You Could Provide One Guide Dog For One Blind American Or You Could Cure Between 400 And 2,000 People Of Blindness.

If We're Going To Live An Ethical Life, It's Not Enough Just To Follow The Thou-shalt-nots. … If We Have Enough, We Have To Share Some Of That With People Who Have So Little.

Sometimes Animals May Suffer More Because Of Their More Limited Understanding. If, For Instance, We Are Taking Prisoners In Wartime We Can Explain To Them That Although They Must Submit To Capture, Search, And Confinement, They Will Not Otherwise Be Harmed And Will Be Set Free At The Conclusion Of Hostilities. If We Capture Wild Animals, However, We Cannot Explain That We Are Not Threatening Their Lives. A Wild Animal Cannot Distinguish An Attempt To Overpower And Confine From An Attempt To Kill; The One Causes As Much Terror As The Other.

When Children See Animals In A Circus, They Learn That Animals Exist For Our Amusement. Quite Apart From The Cruelty Involved In Training And Confining These Animals, The Whole Idea That We Should Enjoy The Humiliating Spectacle Of An Elephant Or Lion Made To Perform Circus Tricks Shows A Lack Of Respect For The Animals As Individuals.