Pace University students protested the Hanneford Circus’s use of elephants outside the Westchester County Center in White Plains on Sat., Feb. 13, in hopes of grabbing the public’s attention and ultimately making their use in shows illegal.

Students learned about the cause through the environmental clinic, which promotes the welfare of elephants in circuses as part of its curriculum, and wanted to do their part to support the cause.

“The clinic didn’t have any involvement in the protest, it was something the students in the clinic wanted to do on their own, senior Jessica Alba said. “We heard that the Hanneford Circus would be coming into town, so the students wanted to protest to get people to understand that it’s not okay to use elephants in circuses.”

The protesters argued that using elephants to perform is animal cruelty because circuses take elephants, which are social animals, away from their families, and this in turn causes them stress.

Circuses also keep the animals standing and locked away, when elephants need to walk around 25 to 40 miles a day to stay healthy.

“When you put them in a cage that’s 20 by 20, the most [elephants] can do is turn around, it’s similar to torture because they face solitary confinement, and it gives horrible psychological problems,” protester and fellow environmental clinic student Pavan Kumar said. “They get feet problems, tuberculosis and other diseases, their life span goes from 40 years to around 14 years.”

Elephants are also not domesticated animals like dogs and cats, which can be trained with positive reinforcement, so to get them to preform tricks trainers use a bullhook—a long device used to stab the elephant’s sensitive skin to strike fear into them.

“Elephant’s skin is about as sensitive as ours, so trainers will stab it to get it into the positions the trainers want, like standing on its head, which is something its massive weight is not designed to do,” Alba said.

During the protest students held up a sign that read “Ringling Brothers Says Retire the Elephants,” trying to use the fact that Ringling Brothers, the biggest circus that used elephants, is retiring its elephants to try and convince Hanneford to do the same. The protest lasted around two hours.

“If [Ringling Brothers] can do it and get rid of that image then any circus should be able, too, so we were kind of driving at Hanneford that way, and [the slogan] retiring the elephants obviously means stop using the elephants in entertainment and bring them to a sanctuary,” Alba said.

The students worked with the anti-animal cruelty group Animal Defenders of Westchester (ADW). Three of their members showed up to the protest.

ADW called News 12 Westchester, who reported on the event by talking to both the protesters and Hanneford.

“The important thing is that Hanneford knew we were there, it’s important they know that someone out there is applying pressure to them,” Director of Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies Michelle Land said.

The protesters were met with mixed reactions; some passing the protest honked their horns in support, while some stuck out their middle fingers in disapproval.

“There was one father who saw us who said ‘that’s good for the elephants, but what about the children?’ My response to that is ‘what about the children?’ the kids are fine, it’s the elephants that are being hurt here,” Alba said.

Environmental Clinic Professor and Senior Fellow for Environmental Affairs John Cronin feels that their message did reach some of the younger circus goers.

“There was a group of small children who had just come out of the circus who saw us demonstrating, and they were looking at us very curiously,” Cronin said. “So I asked them, ‘is this one of the reasons you come to the circus, because of the elephants?’, and they said yes. Then I asked if they were concerned at all about the elephants, and the youngest one said ‘I’m afraid they torture them,’” Cronin said.