Escape From The Circus

 The picture this morning of a troop of confused-looking camels (and a llama) stranded on a road on the outskirts of Madrid spoke volumes. It said that no matter how effective animal rights activists are in cutting electric fences and liberating imprisoned animals, the animals themselves are lost without a follow-up. It's no use having a revolution if you don't know what to do after it. Leaving animals to stand in the middle of a road is not liberation even if you do free them from their cages, because you've just released them into a larger cage.

Circus animals need to be freed from their cages and then re-educated (that is, rewilded and relocalized). This is the problem we have today with man. He needs to be re-educated and re-localized, and drawn away from the industrial into the natural. In the case of these camels that would have been the equivalent of cutting the electric fence and then leading them out (educate derives from Latin ex + ducere, to lead out) of the industrial estate (and their industrialised state) back into the desert whence they originally came. It wouldn't have stopped there either because these camels were probably born into the industrial which would mean that they would need to be retrained in negotiating and navigating that desert. In other words, in escaping from the circus (whether a big top or a big office) the process of liberation is not simply cutting a wire fence. It's a lifetime's work.







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