Circus Elephants Won't Be Performing In Austin This Summer

DOWNTOWN AUSTIN-UT, TX -- When the circus rolls into town this August, patrons won’t have to deal with the elephant in the room. In fact, there won’t be any elephants to be seen.

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus officials disclosed this week an accelerated timetable to remove the pachyderms from their set of animal performers. The tricks-performing troupe of Asian elephants will be retired instead.

The move comes amid mounting criticism by animal rights advocates over the treatment of the elephants while on tour. Bowing to that criticism, the circus’s parent company, Feld Entertainment, previously announced it would phase out its elephant act by 2018.

That phasing-out process instead came early, and just in time for an elephant-free spectacle in Austin come August.

Familiarly billed as the “Greatest Show on Earth,” the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey is scheduled to descend on Austin this August for five days starting Aug. 19. The annual staging of the circus troupe will take place at the Frank Erwin Center downtown.

By the time the circus hits town, it will have been three months since the elephants will have been retired. Instead of performing, the creatures will be enjoying their retirement at the 200-acre Center for Elephant Conservation in Polk County owned by Ringling Bros.

Animal rights advocates applauded the move. The end of the elephant acts portion of the circus ends a popular staple of the show more than a century running.

“It’s pretty remarkable, since they’ve been fighting this fight for so long, and for over a century the icon of the American circus was the elephant,” Matthew Wittmann, a historian of circuses who has advocated ending the use of elephants, told the New York Times.

“The view Ringling always propagated was that you can’t have the circus without the elephants, but the global success of Cirque du Soleil shows that you don’t need to have animals of any kind to have a circus,” Wittmann added.

>> Photo courtesy of Feld Entertainment