Circuses with wild animals, unlike zoos, are not legally required to conserve biodiversity or educate the public. The animals are transported from location to location, repeatedly loaded and unloaded, kept in small beast-wagons, chained within trucks or confined to barren enclosures with little to no ventilation and forced to desecrate, urinate, eat and sleep in their small cages where they can stay for up to a hundred hours at a time. The training of the animals often relies heavily on abuse, physical domination and fear, in an attempt to ensure the constant attention and compliance of the animal in front of an audience.

All the best and most well know circuses like Cirque du Soleil, the New Pickle Family Circus and Cirque Éloize have exciting and innovative shows without the need to beat animals with electric prods, bull hooks, and other painful tools until the animal bleeds.

It is not rare either for one of the circus animals, especially elephants to snap and try and escape from their miserable lives, killing their trainers and members of the public in the process. The imprisoned animals are often very intelligent animals reduced to perform unnatural, repetitive behaviour that usually leads to injury, illness or disease and early death.

If the imprisonment and abuse of animals such as wild cats, elephants, rhinos and hippopotamuses etc, in circuses can be altogether banned in the EU, then the rest of the world might soon follow example.