Ex-Clown Not Joking About Animal Abuse
He was the Spokane kid who ran away from high school to join the circus.
Just 16, Kelly Tansy skipped his senior year at Lewis and Clark to tour the country as a Ringling Bros. clown.
That was way back in 1978. Today, the 34-year-old Tansy wants to run the circus out of town.
Abuses he says he saw during his two years as a professional clown helped foster a lasting contempt for the way circuses treat their performing animals - particularly those lovable elephants.
Tansy aired his views in a meeting the other night at the downtown Spokane library. Members of the Performing Animals Welfare Society plan a sign-waving protest outside the annual Shrine Circus, which opens Friday at the Arena.
So much for cotton candy and the flying trapeze.
Tansy has no specific complaints against the George Carden Circus, which has been contracted by the Shrine organization to appear here.
“It’s all circuses,” he says. “To get these animals to do tricks isn’t possible without some element of brutality.”
The circus occupies a sacred spot in our popular culture. Someone poking holes in the Big Top is almost un-American.
Besides, the elephants don’t look like they’re suffering as they lumber around center ring, saluting their adoring fans with trunks upraised.
A smoke screen, says Tansy.
Elephants and other exotic animals, he says, aren’t born with a lust for show biz. Elephant trainers must use brute force and metal-tipped clubs called bull hooks to teach the critters.
At his meeting, Tansy, a strict vegetarian, played a videotape of everything a ringmaster wouldn’t want the kiddies to see: Elephants attacking their trainers; elephants chained inside sweltering boxcars.
One elephant went berserk carrying screaming kids who paid for a supposedly harmless ride. That elephant and a marauding pachyderm in another film clip were eventually gunned down with more bullets than a gangland slaying.
It was rough stuff, but the most disturbing vignette was of an elephant training session. It looked like the Animal Kingdom equivalent of the Rodney King beating.
A hapless chained elephant learned that cute salute only after having its flesh repeatedly bashed and jabbed with bull hooks.
“They can take a lot of punishment,” says Tansy. “You can beat them and jab them and patch them up. But they squeal in distress. They cower. They show every sign of suffering.”
Certainly abuses exist. But it’s difficult to believe many circus trainers are SS interrogators at heart.
Circuses have a huge financial interest to protect their livestock. According to the Carden outfit, “Circus animals are better treated, better cared for and suffer less abuse than animals in most horse racing stables, dog kennels or zoos.”
The not-so-hidden agenda of PAWS and other animal rights fanatics is to prevent animals from performing under any circumstances.
They falsely elevate animals to the same level as human beings or, as a straight-faced Stephanie Swan told me after the meeting: “They’re (animals) more intelligent than the people.”
It’s this kind of hysterical nonsense that so often makes the animal rights movement look batty.
The paradox is that a large part of Tansy still longs to wear grease paint and cavort around in the Greatest Show on Earth.
He was 12 when a television show on clowns caught his attention. Tansy immediately went into training, learning how to juggle, pratfall and ride a unicycle.
The effort paid off. Tansy was offered one of 30 jobs out of 4,000 applicants. He toured with Ringling Bros. for one season and was signed for a second year.
Midway through the 1980 season, however, Tansy found circus life too regimented and walked out. He traveled briefly with another circus before leaving the sawdust for good.
“I’d still rather go to a circus than a rock concert,” says the former clown. “I just can’t stand the way they treat their animals.”
, DataTimes