For Immediate Release:
September 26, 2002

Contact:
Debbie Leahy 757-622-7382

Washington — Armed with stacks of incriminating USDA inspection reports and citing repeated violations of the federal Animal Welfare Act by the circus, PETA filed a formal complaint today with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), asking the agency to halt Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus’ new ad, entitled "All Our Newborns Come With a Lifetime Guarantee." PETA says that the ad is designed to dupe a trusting public that would be appalled if it knew how Ringling obtains, trains, and treats the elephants it uses, including baby elephants who have died needlessly by its hand.

Among documents turned over to the FTC are United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspection reports detailing the preventable deaths of a baby elephant who drowned while fleeing a Ringling trainer wielding a metal bullhook and another baby elephant whom Ringling forced to perform repeatedly although he was visibly ill. Ringling paid $20,000 to settle the latter case. Another inspection report describes wounds inflicted on two more baby elephants, whom Ringling forcibly separated from their mothers.

PETA’s 12-page deceptive advertising complaint also spells out Ringling’s abusive elephant training methods; the traumatic separation of still-nursing elephants from their mothers; and lives defined by shackles and beatings, confinement to dark, filthy boxcars, and premature deaths. The complaint points out that contrary to Ringling’s claims of conservation, endangered Asian elephants are dying in this circus faster than it is breeding them and that most of the elephants it forces to perform were actually captured in the wild. Of the estimated 63 elephants currently used by Ringling, 44 were taken out of the wild in traumatic capture expeditions and another 21 who died or were transferred to other facilities in recent years were also taken directly from the wild and their families overseas.

"Ringling’s ad deliberately misleads consumers into thinking that its elephants are well cared for and happy, when the fact is that its elephants spend their lives deprived of joy and family, kept in chains, and made to perform out of fear," says PETA legal counsel Philip Hirschkop. "We’re not buying Ringling’s ‘we care’ con job, and, we hope, neither will the FTC."

For more information about the cruelty of animal circuses, including undercover videotape of elephants being beaten by trainers, and to read the complaint in its entirety, please visit Circuses.com.