Camels Replace Elephants at 2016 Oakland County Fair

Davisburg, MI — Endangered African elephants won’t return to the Oakland County Fair, which opens Friday for a 10-day run, but it’s hardly a victory for the animal rights activists who cited 18 complaints by the USDA and circus industry stalwarts in a call on fair officials to sever their relationship with a circus that owns the elephants and other exotic animals.

The absence of elephants this year is not a result of shared outrage over the treatment of Bombi and Daisy, two individuals captured in the wild in 1974 that PETA claims don’t receive proper veterinary care, sufficient space to roam or appropriate food. Rather, the fair dates changed this year to avoid conflicts with the Fourth of July, and Circus Pages was already booked and sending its elephants and other exotic animals elsewhere for the fair’s run, fair co-manager L.C. Scramlin told Patch.

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In the place of elephant rides, camel rides will be provided by Show-Me Safari Petting Zoo from Missouri, Scramlin said.

He downplayed the opposition, saying the change.org petition, started three years ago by Ben Eidt, of Troy, hasn’t reached its 5,000 signature goal in three years. In a letter supporting the petition, Eidt wrote that he found the circumstances surrounding the highly intelligent animals’ capture and consignment to never-ending circus acts “disturbing.”

The far better-known Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus agreed last year to retire its elephants in a decision that capped years of legal battles and stormy protests centered on what activists see as the sentient beings’ life in chains and small, cramped spaces that deprive them of the space they need to move and remain agile.

Smaller circuses are also increasingly targeted by activists who say elephants should be allowed to live a dignified life in a place where they have acres to roam.

At a county fair in Illinois last week, PETA organized protests demanding that the circus elephant Nosey be retired. Elephants are extremely social animals, and activists complained that Nosey has led a solitary life for nearly three decades. Also, PETA charged, the elephant has chronic health problems, including degenerative joint disease, diarrhea and an abnormal thickening of the skin.

Scramlin said fair organizers “bounced around” the idea of discontinuing the elephant act before the scheduling conflict.

“We would be blind if we didn’t know there was some opposition, but it never was real vocal here,” he said, adding that the majority of supporters of Eidt’s petition live outside of the United States. “The very last Sunday of our fair was the first time some people in the audience spoke up in protest.”

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Fair organizers checked out Circus Pages’ record and were “just comfortable” that its animals are well treated, Scramlin said. Many of the animals, including rare white tigers and white lions, are from 30 to 36 years of age and have been raised by the Pages family as orphans.

Scramlin doesn’t expect animal rights activists to like this year’s camel rides any better than they did the elephant rides. But with an agricultural fair that aims to reconnect suburban residents with their lost farm heritages, fair officials have to be careful about where they draw the line on animal-welfare complaints, he said.

The fair works closely with the Michigan State Fair, put on annually in Novi by a private limited liability company after the state lost a more traditional fair, and research gathered indicates about three-fourths of those attending have never set foot on a farm.

The same statistics apply in suburban Oakland County, Scramlin said.

“We used to talk to people who said they’d gone to grandma’s farm for summer,” he said. “Now, we’ve got kids whose parents tell them they went to grandpa and grandma’s farm during the summer, and a large percentage who don’t have connection at all.”

As a result, fair organizers added the Miracle of Birth Barn, where cows, lambs, goats and pigs are scheduled to give birth during the course of the fair.

“When we first started the Miracle of Birth barn, our thought was how much kids would learn how we take care of farm animals,” Scramlin said. “What we’ve found when there’s a birth over there, the people who ask the questions are 30 and 50 years old.

“If we have a cow calving, we’ll look at the bleachers and see who is watching, and that tells me there’s a bigger gap than we realized in how many generations people are removed from agriculture.”

Patch has reached out to the Eidt, the creator of the Change.org petition, for comment on the switch to camel rides. If we hear back, we'll update this story.

Image: Paul via Flickr / Creative Commons