[Paboberto]

<<The ALF isn't an association that has card carrying members. If you want to count every whack job that tries to kill soneone over an animals as a member then sure - you can validate your point. I find your argument is ridiculous in that aspect as you can do that with everything:

John Wayne Gacy was an murdering pedophile, who happened to be a clown - therefor - all clowns must be the same...>>

This is called a straw man argument. But in this case it works both ways. You could say the exact same thing about animal trainers. If bad animal training habits are the problem: work to get rid of them rather than the animals.

Remember that the elphants and other performing animals are the trainers life. The people who work with them are invested with money, time, and in blood sweat and tears in their health and well being. A injured or sick (or even out of shape) animal can't perform and is a pain a huge expense to take care of for the trainer and the company. Why would any trainer do something purposefully to hurt their animal when it is sooo much easier to make the animal want to do it through bribery? Also if anyone is aware of how much not a object a circus animal is, it is the people who are around them all the time: the trainers.

An animal trained with negative reinforcement is useless. Negative reinforcement is a world of "can't" and "don't." You can train a person or animal not to do things with negative reinforcement, but it is very very very very hard to teach them to do something usuing it and the results are unreliable. Positive reinforcement is much better for that because it makes them take a action to get a reward instead of not doing everything but that to avoid punishment. Circus animals and pets are trained for tricks in the exact same way: all it takes is time, and patience and food.