[jsrjenkins]

Just my humble opinion, but I think the loss of the circus will actually not be a great help to the conservation of these wonderful animals.

Elephants are in the public imagination largely due to the circus and the zoo. We like elephants because we can actually go and see them, which makes us want to keep them around. No one really does anything [donate, protest] about certain endangered species, like the Saola because they aren't in the public eye. Elephants, rhinoceros and Tigers have very extensive programs to protect them, even large national parks, because there is large public support for their conservation. The panda likewise would simply be a curiosity and evolutionary dead end if it wasn't for human intervention.

Once the public doesn't even know what an elephant looks like, the public support will diminish. Certainly there has been many abuses in the circus [like in many other things human beings do], but I just hope that people don't forget about the elephants. I would say that one of the reasons that they haven't been hunted to extinction was due to the fact that many children remember with fondness these wonderful animals, and that contact they had with them was from the circus.