Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey have closed down.

[Trekkin]

How can you tell if they mind or not, can you talk to animals? No? Oh well.

Just wanted to point out that, unnecessary snark aside, we can actually communicate with animals pretty well. There have been studies ([[REDACTED]]) that show that interspecies communication is totally a thing; dogs can recognize a ticked-off cat and will react differently to the same command given in different tones of voice, rats make a sound that is recognizably laughter -- once pitched down enough that we can hear it -- when you tickle them, cats do know we want them to do things and just don't care, and the list goes on and on. Heck, we can tell when elephants are mourning their dead and watch their family relationships evolve.

So yes, actually, we can talk to animals. Not precisely enough to discuss philosophy, perhaps, but if you're going to argue that we should stop working with animals altogether because nobody can tell what they're feeling, you are demonstrably wrong. You might not be able to talk to animals (although if you can't, how do you know they don't like being abused?), but people better-informed about animal behavior can certainly tell the difference between a happy animal having fun performing tricks and one that's been abused into doing things and there's no real reason to immediately discount people's intuition on the matter given the studies I described above.

As it happens, I don't like the use of animals in circus-type performances, let alone at places like Seaworld; it is absolutely the case that the economics trumps the animals' welfare way too often. I don't think that means that it's never okay to train them, though, even to perform tricks -- and I'm hopeful that as our ability to communicate with animals becomes more sophisticated, we can find more equitable ways of interacting with them, and perhaps there will be something like a circus again.