Committee defeats elephant ban bill

AUGUSTA – If elephants are banned from performing in circuses, beef critters at Fryeburg Fair will be next, according to Rep. John Nutting, D-Leeds. The Legislature’s Agricultural, Conservation and Forestry Committee agreed on a stormy Thursday and voted 9-3 (with one member absent) against LD 628, a bill to ban elephants from performing in Maine circuses.

After the vote, sponsor Rep. Christopher Muse, D-South Portland, promised to take the battle to the floor of both houses and the ethics commission. Muse said an unnamed lobbyist claimed that supporters of the bill worked for the People for the Ethical Treatment for Animals, or PETA. “That was an outright lie and it is a serious problem,” Muse said.

Some consider PETA an extreme organization for its activities against eating lobster and other animal rights issues.

At the public hearing, Muse said that elephants are intelligent, complex and powerful animals and it was impossible to humanely train, control and confine them. “These animals are captured, removed from their natural habitat and made prisoners for the rest of their lives. They are chained up, stuffed in trucks and forced to do tricks to make us laugh. It’s just wrong,” he said.

Muse said 53 people have been killed in the last decade by enraged elephants that have tried to free themselves from their circus chains.

On Thursday, Muse said the committee rushed to judgment, ignoring several national and international reports on elephant abuse by circus handlers. “That was unfortunate. They never read the information they asked for. But that information can make a difference on the floor,” Muse said.

It was Muse’s daughter, Regan, who sparked the bill. The girl refused to go to a Portland circus because of animal abuse and asked her father, “Do you think those animals really want to jump through flaming hoops?” Animals belong in the wild, not the circus, the poised 7-year-old told the committee. At the four-hour public hearing, several schoolchildren read essays in support of the bill, dubbed “Regan’s Law.”

A spokesman from the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus called the Muse bill “extreme and discriminatory.”

Most committee members saw no need for more laws on animal abuse. Rep Roderick Carr, R-Lincoln, in making the motion to reject the bill, said there are sufficient laws to protect animals and more regulations could just “compound the problem.” The Department of Agriculture is handling the situation, said Rep. Jacqueline A Lundeen, D-Mars Hill. Singling out elephants for special attention would open the door for additional animal rights protests and potentially could damage the economy, said Rep. Clifton E. Foster, R-Gray.

Only three Democrats, Senate committee Chairman Linda Rogers McKee of Wayne, Rep. Raymond Pineau of Jay and Rep. Paul Volenik of Brooklin, voted in support of the bill.

McKee admitted the children’s emotional testimony at the public hearing and their thinking “outside the box” moved her and changed her way of thinking about animal performances. Pineau said he was against the “cruelty” used by circus handlers in making elephants perform. Volenik expressed the fear that rampaging elephants create a real danger to audiences.

Although several cities have passed legislation to ban performing elephants, no state has passed such a ban, officials said.