How P.T. Barnum Helped the Early Days of Animal Rights

The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus will put on its last show this month, after more than 140 years in performance. Many factors led to the demise of the so-called “Greatest Show on Earth”—growing costs, shrinking attention spans, the rise of other forms of entertainment, the effect of local transport legislation on a show that still rides the rails. But one of the loudest arguments in recent memory concerned the show’s animal performers, which came to appear more retrograde than entertaining thanks to an evolving dialogue on animal rights. Following a damning 2011 Mother Jones investigative report and ugly multi-year litigation over elephant care, the circus’s parent company Feld Entertainment retired its use of elephants at a performance last May.

The showman P.T. Barnum, who died in 1891, takes a lot of heat as the original architect of the circus; he’s ostensibly the man who created callous demand for performing tigers and dancing elephants in the first place. Though there’s truth to this view, a look at Barnum’s career also reveals his surprising involvement with a movement that would, over a century. Through his unlikely friendship with the prominent early animal-rights activist Henry Bergh in the late 1800s, Barnum found himself in the thick of the debate over the care and feeding of Victorian animal entertainers. In fact, the animal-rights movement might not have survived to exist in its modern form and breadth if not for the media exposure Barnum lent it in its fragile infancy.