Ringling Bros Circus Protest Interviews with Pat Cuviello and Deniz Bolbol, 8/17/11: video

(video 9:07)

Deniz Bolbol watches the Ringling elephants over a wall with the use of a videocamera on the end of a pole. She remarks that the elephants appear beaten down in the way they respond to their handlers. In 2004, Deniz Bolbol recorded a Ringling handler stabbing and jabbing a 7-year-old chained elephant named Angelica outside of the Oakland Arena as Ringling walked Angelica to the venue to perform. The footage received extensive news coverage. Ringling responded the following year by arresting Deniz for trespassing when she tried to videorecord from the same location, leading to the Oakland civil suit and Deniz winning the right to record outside of the arena. Now, however, Ringling no longer walks the elephants back and forth three times during each show but keeps the elephants within the perimeter wall the entire time. Additionally, at the San Jose show, Ringling shined a strobe light at one of the cameras attempting to record over the wall.

Deniz says that the animals are just commodities to Ringling as they are shuffled from city to city all year except for a few weeks during the winter. Ringling has been documented repeatedly beating their elephants and chaining them for extended periods of time. Some elephants have been forced to perform in service of Ringling's profits for decades. One such elephant named Sarah who collapsed while being loaded into a boxcar in Anaheim on August 6th has been forced to perform for Ringling for 50 years, including in the show that night in San Jose.

Deniz discusses how Ringling coopts the corporate media in towns to which the circus travels, in order to guarantee that coverage of the circus is positive and doesn't mention the presence of protesters or tales of animal abuse. In San Jose for instance, NBC-11 sent a news van out to do a story on opening night at the circus, but neglected to talk with anyone associated with the demonstration, much less even mention that a huge number of people were present protesting. The reason? NBC was an official sponsor of the circus and the station's weatherperson, Christina Loren, was an honorary master of ceremony and ringmaster for the Ringling show in San Jose.

http://www.idausa.org