PERFORMING ANIMALS
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sia,—It seems to me-that Lord Lonsdale forces the issue to breaking point, and for these chief reasons :—
1. He refuses to resign from his Vice-Presidency of the R.S.P.C.A. or from his Presidency of Mr. Mills's circus, although he stated in his previous letter that he objected to travelling menageries when, as I pointed out, one was attached to this very circus. 2. He says ho has gone into " every possible detail " of what goes on in this circus. NoW, he has given no explanation whatever of Cossmeyer's death or of the continued presence of the polar bear in this circus.
3. Again, " The idea of any cruelty as to the tiger and the horse is too absurd for words. The horse was miserable without the tiger ... the tiger was born in the horse's stable. . . . They are most amusing in the stable."
Now, I have seen this tiger in the menagerie, and he was certainly not in a stable. He was in a wretchedly small cage, so small that in the opinion of every decent man or woman I have met its size alone constituted cruelty in their minds though not perhaps in the law's. • He certainly looked miserable, but so did the lions and the bears, each in a cage large enough to allow him to take two steps to the right, two steps to the left, with monotonous and heartbreaking regularity.
There is one further point about the horse which has so far escaped attention. The neck covering is furnished with spikes. What happens if and when the tiger misjudges his distance ? In any case the presence of these spikes hardly lends colour to the story of that wonderful friendship.
A member of this League, in a letter of which Scotland Yard has a copy, states : " . . I happened (at Olympia on January 15th) to be just at the back by the passage-way where the animals leave the arena—the tiger came quickly slinking through, past a keeper who was waiting for him with a whip in one hand and a double-pronged fork in the other. He dashed into his travelling box, and I saw no more, but I had seen enough to last inc a lifetime."—I am, Sir, &c.,
EDMUND T. MACMICHA EL . Secretary, Performing and Captive Animals' Defence League, 17 Buckingham Street, Adelphi, London, MC. 2.
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