Steel Rods and Cattle Prods

I saw this van yesterday:

And of course the culprit behind the less than blatant message:

So I looked it up. Apparently the Ringling Brothers do beat their elephants, even, the animal rights organization says, to death. But is PeTA - who has brought the issue to court - blowing the case out of proportion?

It's not easy to train an elephant to perform tricks with circus freaks atop their back. For the safety of the performers as well as the guests, it might be necessary to up the stakes in the Pavlovian conditioning paradigm to keep things together.

At the same time, I suppose that animals have feelings too. PeTA looks out for those fragile emotions, and perhaps the absence of a smack with a metal rod or a quick poke with a cattle prod isn't the way to keep a ten thousand pound mammal from rolling over your kid.

But who would you rather take the pain?

Here is a link where you can learn about elephants and even see a video of the circus beating them up.
This is a story about how the animal rights organization applauded several elephants for maiming or killing the abusive monsters in their cage.

Now I'm not saying that animals should be tortured, but if there's going to be a circus, there better be some damn sure ways of keeping humans safe before anything else.

And now for something beautiful.
this is my city.