The only purpose it ever served was entertainment.

Now, without one of the biggest draws, people aren't going.

On one hand, I'm happy to hear that they'll no longer be mistreating animals but on the other hand, let's not pretend that those of us who wear fur or leather or eat meat are somehow less responsible for animal cruelty.

I believe that someone who eats chicken is less cruel than someone who enslaves and tortures an elephant for several decades.

The world consumes 50 billion chickens a year.

Chickens are stupid and we try not to torture them. Elephants are smart and we steal them from their mothers, chain them up, break their spirits, beat them, etc. Don't Tell me you can't see any difference.

As a former rural kid; the idea that chickens are not tortured is a widespread cultural fantasy that has more to do with keeping our impression of the quality and power of our moral judgements intact than anything to do with the lives of chickens.

I am not trying to crucify you by any means! I have eaten more than my share of chickens, and have been horrified by the suffering of elephants as well.

I am instead participating in this discussion because I think that the way this argument is structured betrays the weakness of our way of conceiving of allowable/forbidden indifference to another creature with which we can also share emotional experiences. Of course we must eat, and there is vast culture around eating animals or using them as tools or entertainers.

Still, it doesn't mean we need to justify it with swiss-cheese moralizing about intelligence.

Have you ever seen how chickens are raised for mass-scale meat production?

I used to catch the bus across the street from a chicken-processing plant. They live in cages that are just large enough for the chicken itself, and the cages are stacked quite high, so that except for the top level, all of them are constantly getting waste dumped on them by the chickens further up in the stack.

Seems pretty torturous to me.

You've obviously never spent any time around chickens. They are not stupid by any means. They are able to solve problems, they are social, they have individual personalities.

Chickens aren't really stupid.

You're wrong about leather. Leather is a byproduct of the meat industry: no one kills cows for their skin. Cows are killed for their meat, and the hides are probably fairly worthless until they're processed into leather. If beef production were to suddenly stop (due to lab-grown meat, for instance), cow leather would disappear too. Cow leather isn't even all that great, compared to some other animals' leather (like goats), it's just a lot cheaper because of the beef industry.

Finally, there's different degrees of cruelty. In theory, at least, it should be perfectly possible to raise and slaughter cows humanely. You feed it and give it pasture to graze on, and then one day when it's mature you suddenly chop its head off. Is having regular food, vet care, space to roam free from predators really a bad life? Of course, in reality many of the handlers can be abusive, and that should be policed, but this isn't really comparable to the poor elephants who were abused every day to "train" them, and forced to perform.

I don't believe that I limited my comment to cow leather.

It's all interconnected. The price of meat is influenced by the fact that money can be made selling the hides to leather makers and the bones for other purposes, including recovering collagen.

I'm not sure if animals would agree that an easy life free from random predation is much better than a harder life that comes with freedom. One could argue that the Eloi have a similar arrangement with the Morlocks.

I'm not arguing against meat eating or leather wearing, I do both. I'm just pointing out that there are more widespread examples of animals enduring cruel treatment than the circus.

>I don't believe that I limited my comment to cow leather.

I did. Usually, when people talk about "leather", they're talking about cow leather, not goat leather, sheepskin, alligator skin, etc. Usually, those other things, which are far more rare and expensive, are explicitly named. No one with an alligator-skin handbag calls it a "leather handbag". If cow meat magically became worthless because no one wanted to eat it any more (or even use it for pet food), no one would be killing cows for their skin IMO. The price would be too high, and you could get the skins from other animals instead. Goat leather is much nicer than cow leather, for instance. Why pay a ton for cow leather when you can have something better instead for that price? We only use it so much because it's cheap, and because synthetic alternatives aren't quite as good yet (though that's changing).

>I'm not sure if animals would agree that an easy life free from random predation is much better than a harder life that comes with freedom.

That's not the alternative. Cows are not wild animals. They're domesticated; they only exist because we bred them to be the way they are. They couldn't even survive in the wild. This isn't like alligators being hunted in the wild swamps of FL for their skins. So the alternative is 1. an easy life free from random predation or 2. not existing at all. The same alternative exists for any livestock animal: it's either be born into a life being used by humans somehow, or not be born at all. Which is better? I really don't know. I'm not sure anyone can know that really, since we've never had to live that life, and can't really know the thoughts and desires of these animals. Do chickens living at a crowded Tyson facility, confined to a tiny cage and being shat on by chickens in little cages stacked on top of them, hate their lives so much that they wish they'd never been born? Maybe. Do chickens raised in a family's backyard with lots of space to roam and a henhouse they can enter or leave at will, but who one day get grabbed and flipped upside-down and their head chopped off, prefer they'd never been born? Somehow I doubt it, until that last fateful day (which they probably didn't know was coming; they're probably not smart enough to wonder "hey, why aren't there any elderly chickens here?").

Cirque de Soleil is still around, but they cater to people who want a classy, but more kid friendly, and arguably more consistently entertaining alternative to theater.

More kid friendly? I would say the opposite they are more adult friendly then Ringling.

Also Glob Trotters, Disney on Ice and Marvel Live have taken over and owned by the same company.

More kid friendly and consistently entertaining than theater, not Ringling. I say more consistently entertaining, because you never know what you're going to get with theater. .

Theater is NEVER kid friendly unless it is Barney Live. Even the High School Productions are kind of over the top for my taste. The last one I saw and I knew better was "Rent" for High School. Then the next year was "Chicago".

Yeah, they're not for me either, but at least they're trying to evolve the concepts.

Nice blog post.