CRUELTY TO WILD ANIMALS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 192, 3 January 1913, Page 4

CRUELTY TO WILD ANIMALS.

i (To the Editor.) Sir—l see in your issue of to-day the account of a struggle with a leopard iii Barton's Circus at Wellington.- I read that an attendant, in order to clean out the animal's cage, put it' into another occupied by some baboons, two of which it promptly devoured, and had subsequently to bo heat en into semiinsensibility before it could be got teick into its own cage. What impresses me most in the account is not (the pluck of the second attendant who grappled with the leopard, undoubted as that was, but the stupidity of the first who placed the animal in si cage containing and the cruelty of the whole proceeding, cruelty, which was the outcome, as most cruelty is, of stupidity. But the whole thing is the result of the miserable and unnatural conditions under which large wild animals are kept in travelling menageries. These menageries, which aire' called, "circuses.'* are very different from a well-appointed zoo. The animals are necessarily confined in cages ridiculously small for them, ami in travelling from place to place endure much discomfort, and misery. No humane person ought to encourage a travelling circus, and out, members of the newly-fonmed Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in particular should set their faces against them and boycott them by refusing. to be present at their exhibitions.—l am, etc., ALGERNON H. COLYTLE.