Spotlight: Why Do Magicians Use Animals?
You may view this question as very easy, or as very hard. I teach Animal Law and Policy to law students and speak regularly to animal rights advocates. All of us, and you, abhor cruelty to animals. But beyond this, there is a very wide range of opinions about everything from zoo and circus animals, to rabbits from hats, to your dog learning to shake hands to get a treat.
Seriously, some academics think that even shaking hands for a treat or wearing a hair bow should be criminalized as an “unnatural” behavior imposed by us humans on animals just for our amusement.
My recent book project, Animal Wizards: A Critical History of Magicians’ Most Trusting Assistants, caused me to think hard about why 19th- and early 20th-century magicians used so many (and so many different kinds of) animals. Animals don’t fit magicians’ “packs flat, plays big” gold standard for convenience. They were an investment (of time, and money), from their acquisition, to their care, feeding, housing, and transport, to their use onstage and off. Certainly, magicians must have thought it worth all the trouble.