St. Catharines Council Bans Animal Circuses On City Properties

Ban Follows Decades of Animal Welfare Activists Lobbying for an end to Animal Circuses at City Arenas

“Niagara Action for Animals (NAfA) has been campaigning against animal-based circus in Niagara for as long as we have been in existence – 30 years plus.  It was one of our initial efforts. … THANK YOU to everyone who took the time to send an email to council on this. Your efforts paid off.”                                                   – from a statement circulated this June 25^th by Catherine Ens, director and founder of NAfA, one of Ontario’s longest lasting, citizen-based animal welfare groups

A News Commentary by Doug Draper

Posted June 27^th, 2019 on Niagara At Large

St. Catharines City Councillor Karrie Porter put a motion on the table to ban animal circuses on city properties, and it has passed. It’s a first for Niagara after decades of citizen protests over these animal entertainment shows.

At long last and most mercifully for the sake of humanity and all animals big and small, the show won’t go on.

Not if is an animal circus show and the ringmasters and their sponsors want to stage it in one of St. Catharines arenas or any other properties the city owns.

After literally decades of animal welfare groups like Niagara Action for Animals (NAfA) lobbying for an end to animal circuses in St. Catharines and other municipalities across the Niagara region, St. Catharines’ council passed a first-of-its-kind-in-Niagara motion, banning animal circuses on city properties.

And this ban, as the quote above from veteran animal welfare activist Catherine Ens noted in the quote above, has been a very long time coming.

Indeed, this journalist covered a number of animal welfare demonstrations attended by Ens going back three decades ago when I was working at the St. Catharines Standard and the circus came to town, and it was never pleasant being there in the middle of it.

The circus usually set up at the city’s Jack Gatecliff Arena off Geneva and St. Paul Street, or whatever it was called at the time, and was hosted by a service club in the community hoping to raise money from the gate receipts for charity.

An anti-circus billboard Niagara Action for Action raised funds to have put up, this one in the Welland area, in 2016.

The club (which I’d rather not name here because I don’t believe its members had any ill intentions at all) was populated mostly by men from a generation that saw circuses as fund entertainment for families, and they almost always expressed upset or anger to me that the newspaper would send a reporter out to cover a protest when, as they saw it, they were trying to do something good for the community.

Then there were all the parents with their children, streaming past the demonstrators with their protest signs, some of them hurling profanity at the protesters while holding kids no older than seven or eight by the hand.

The whole thing made for a bad time, to say the least. And I sometimes wondered what motivated Ens and members of her group who, for their part, stayed true to a pledge they made to remain civil, to put up with all of the steely stares they were getting from service club members, along with the verbal abuse from some of the circus patrons.

Then I began to read eye-witness accounts of some of the treatment circus animals received while they were being trained and transported from place to place to perform tricks for people’s amusement.

Around the same time, I viewed a segment on CBC TV’s long-running program, The Nature of Things, where circus trainers were caught on hidden cameras, hitting elephants over the head with wooden clubs and doing other abusive things to animals to make them comply.

Sitting at home with the television on, watching an elephant being cracked in the skull with what looked like a two-by-four, was far more disturbing than attending the demonstrations in front of the arena and left no reason to question why Ens and her animal welfare friends were so determined to shut these animal circuses down.

So I can only say good for Karrie Porter, the first-term St. Catharines city councillor, for tabling the motion to ban animal circuses on city properties, and good for the council for passing the motion this June 24^th.

The ban is the first of its kind in Niagara, which has rarely ever been a leader in the province or country for taking steps like this, and it follows similar bans, including one passed in Sault St. Marie last year, in Windsor the year before and dozens of others passed in  municipalities across Canada over the past decade.

Ens said she hopes other municipalities in Niagara will follow St. Catharines example and pass bans too.

“I believe there is a sea-change in the way society is viewing animals used in entertainment and perhaps this is a sign of things to come,” she said.

And there certainly are signs of that.

Two years ago, Ringling Bros., the circus of all circuses that billed itself for the 146 years of its existence as “the greatest show on earth,” folded up its tents for the final time due to dwindling audiences.

This spring, Canada’s federal government passed a law banning the acquisition of any more whales and other marine mammals by aquariums or amusement parks like Marineland in Niagara Falls. If the law holds, that will spell the end of marine mammal exhibits anywhere in the country when the last of the marine mammals now at these parks expires.

At a time when we scientists around the world, in a report released this May by the United Nations, warned that we may be on the verge of a mass extinction of species due to the impacts of climate change, the news of a ban on animal circuses in St. Catharines, and the federal ban on marine mammal captivity may seem small.

Yet these are steps in the right direction and they should inspire all of us to take more.

Every step in the right direction counts and it is the only chance we have to stave off would could be a catastrophe for all life on this planet if we do nothing.

To view a story that Niagara At Large posted this May on the United Nations report warning of massive species extinction, click on – https://niagaraatlarge.com/2019/05/07/un-issues-devastating-report-on-rapid-extinction-of-life-on-this-planet/ .

To view a story Niagara At Large posted earlier this June on the federal government’s passage of a law that would ultimately ban marine mammal captivity, click on – https://niagaraatlarge.com/2019/06/12/at-long-last-canada-passes-a-bill-that-will-one-day-end-the-keeping-of-whales-and-dolphins-in-captivity/ .

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