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Please Help Alert Venues to This Abusive Animal Act
Baboon Lagoon is a ridiculous traveling act featuring six female hamadryas baboons. Reduced to clowns, these intelligent primates with a documented capacity for abstract thought are dressed in frilly tutus and forced to entertain gawking audiences with foolish antics. Baboon Lagoon regularly makes the rounds of state and county fairs as well as other venues around the world, not only causing tremendous animal suffering, but also desensitizing audiences, including impressionable children, to the cruelty inherent in captive animal acts.
Run by Lee and Judy Stevens, a husband-and-wife team that bills itself as "featured animal trainers for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus"—a circus plagued with violations of the Animal Welfare Act—Baboon Lagoon is hell on Earth for these social, curious, and complex animals
Baboon Lagoon's Act Is All Wet
Baboon Lagoon's program features the animals riding a motorcycle, doing back flips, and climbing a ladder. Waiting for their turn onstage, the animals are chained to chairs, where they are forced to tolerate bright lights, blaring music, and amplified dialog. During a recent performance, one of the baboons was observed repeatedly bobbing her head, another obsessively groomed her wrist, and another simply turned her back to the audience for the entire show, seemingly trying to block out the whole sordid scene. Such neurotic behaviors are typical of animals enduring excruciating stress and boredom from captivity, as well as abusive training methods.
Cruel Training Techniques
Like all primates used in entertainment, baboons do not "perform" unless they are forced to—often through intimidation, abuse, and solitary confinement. According to Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a research associate with the Institute of Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya, who has spent more than 26 years studying baboons in a national park in East Africa, "Training most baboons to do tricks of the sort displayed is not trivial ... it is highly likely that it required considerable amounts of punishment (physical or otherwise) and intimidation."
There is also evidence that solitary confinement is a method used to ensure that the animals will perform on command: A trainer of circus chimpanzees has admitted that he keeps the animals in solitary confinement for the majority of the time so that they will be more motivated to perform.
Behind the Scenes
With two to three shows each day, the baboons spend the majority of their time—up to 22 hours per day—caged in semi-darkness. They are kept in traveling cages that measure approximately 2 feet by 3 feet-metal boxes with wire mesh fronts and sawdust scattered on the floor. The cages are built into a travel truck so little, if any, natural light penetrates their enclosures.
On the road for six months out of each year, the baboons are subjected to the stress of intense confinement, loneliness, and insufficient exercise. The Stevens boast that Baboon Lagoon has traveled all over the world, including Japan, Canada, Bermuda, and "all except two states."
Baboons Belong in the Wild
Captivity is a sad state of affairs both for animals stolen from the wild or those born into it.
The lives of these captive baboons are a far cry from those of their wild relatives, who live in large, close-knit communities and travel together for miles each day through forests, savannahs, and hills. Baboons are highly social and caring animals who suffer when deprived of companionship. In the wild, baboons will even stage sit-down protests or hurl rocks at cars when a loved one is killed on the road. The Stevens claim that their baboons were all born in captivity and "came to [them] when they were very, very young." In other words, as babies, they were torn from their mothers' sides—probably within days of birth—and sold to the Stevens to be trained and exploited as "performers."
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