Circuses Charged With Mishandling Elephants

The April 28 filing alleges that during a March 2014 in Saint Charles, Mo., Florida-based Royal Hanneford Circus ginned up crowd noise that spooked three elephants at 10,000-seat Family Arena.

The crowd noise included people “stomping their feet on the metal bleachers,” according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Elephant handlers, according to the complaint, lost control of one animal that proceeded to pass between two trailers, sustaining abrasions and cuts. Another elephant also had superficial lacerations. No people were injured. The complaint says the two circus companies “willfully violated” federal regulations requiring the routes to elephant enclosures be safe for passage without stress or harm, according to the paper.

The USDA also alleges that three weeks later in Altoona, Penn., handlers of those elephants wrongly watered the animals in a publicly accessible area. Also named in the complaint is Oklahoma-based Carson 7 Barnes Circus, which leases the elephants to Royal Hanneford. The Moolah Shriners organization, which stages the annual circus in Saint Charles, was not named in the complaint.