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Kenneth Feld, head of Feld Entertainment. Animal tricks and dirty tricks?
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Ringling Bros. and Feld Entertainment, which owns Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, have been waging an illegal dirty tricks campaign to try to discredit those who criticize the circus’s dismal treatment of animals. So desperate was Ringling to improve its tarnished image that it even hired former Central Intelligence Agency operative Clair E. George, who was once responsible for the CIA’s covert operations worldwide. Now George has come clean. In sworn court testimony and published reports, he and other operatives say that Feld Entertainment officials ordered and paid for illegal spying, wiretapping, videotaping, harassment and theft of private documents. In their sights: PETA.
George’s job was to review reports from other spies “based on their surveillance of, and efforts to counter, the activities of” PETA and other groups. These spies took hundreds of pages of private documents, including personnel and payroll records.
PETA contends that employees of Feld and Ringling were part of a conspiracy involved in wiretapping, breaking and entering, burglary and other crimes to impede PETA and other animal rights groups.
Among the evidence:
• Ringling backed Bobby Berosini, a tawdry Las Vegas hotel performer who repeatedly beat orangutans with a metal bar before taking them on stage. When PETA exposed Berosini’s vicious treatment of these sensitive primates, Feld urged Berosini to sue PETA and promised that Ringling Bros. would pay any damages.
• Ringling secretly supported the now-defunct Putting People First, an outfit whose sole aim was to discredit animal rights activists.
• Feld allegedly hired another spy who, with George’s help, successfully kept a freelance writer from publishing a tell-all book exposing Feld family and Ringling Bros. Circus secrets. According to a lawsuit filed separately, Feld’s hired gun “befriended” the writer to persuade her to stop working on the Feld book and write a different one. George even found a publisher for this other book and funneled a cash “advance” from Feld through the publisher to pay the unsuspecting writer. This publisher also approached PETA asking to collaborate on an inside look at the animal rights movement—an offer we refused! (Read more about this case at Circuses.com.)
Says PETA’s attorney Phil Hirschkop, “A number of recent lawsuits against Feld entities have shown a pattern of illegal activities by Feld Entertainment agents. PETA is suing Feld and his agents for conspiring to pursue felonious activities, against PETA and others, to cover up their barbarous treatment of elephants and other animals.”
So far, PETA’s court action has forced Kenneth Feld to turn over more than 200 documents, including PETA’s internal records that were illegally obtained. Now, we need your help to put Ringling out of the animal abuse business forever.
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Ringling Bros.’ Record of Abuse
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Feld Entertainment would do well to spend time cleaning up its act. Former employees have reported that Ringling elephants are regularly and viciously beaten.
 Government inspectors have cited Ringling for:
• failure to provide animals with sufficient space or exercise
• nearly baking tigers alive in a boxcar
In less than two years:
• two baby elephants died
• a caged tiger was shot to death
• a horse who was used despite a chronic medical condition died during Ringling’s animal march
• a wild-caught sea lion was found dead in her transport container
Most recently:
• Mark Oliver Gebel, son of Gunther Gebel-Williams, was charged with cruelty to animals for striking an endangered Asian elephant with a sharp metal bullhook but escaped conviction.
• A Pittsburgh television investigative unit witnessed elephant abuse when the Ringling train arrived. Said the reporter: “We saw a handler using his bullhook aggressively, hitting an elephant in the trunk, then the leg. He’s the same handler who got a bullhook caught in an elephant’s mouth in Oklahoma last June. [We] asked Ringling about this. They said what [we] saw doesn’t happen.”
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