For Immediate Release:
February 17, 2022
Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382
Dade City, Fla. – When the Bay Area Renaissance Festival opens this Saturday, there’ll be an “elephant” and a herd of PETA and Animals Rights Foundation of Florida members waiting at the gates. They’ll all be there to trumpet an alert to fairgoers that using bullhooks—weapons that resemble a fireplace poker with a sharp iron hook on one end—to threaten elephants truly belongs to a distant era, even though they’re still used at the festival, and to warn that interactions with elephants carry the risk of injury and disease transmission.
When: Saturday, February 19, 1:15 p.m.
Where: 12838 Auton Rd., Dade City
“Elephants are intelligent and sensitive individuals who are separated from their families just for the fleeting entertainment of fairgoers,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA is calling on the lords, ladies, and gentlepeople of the Bay Area Renaissance Festival to stop the medievil spectacle of elephant rides.”
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview.
For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
