Fans watch Ringling Bros. circus at AAA as show's run comes to close

Curtain call on circus will happen in May

MIAMI – It's almost the end of the road for "The Greatest Show on Earth," as the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus announced Saturday that the curtain is coming down on the 146-year-old show.

"We will be closing both units of Ringling Brothers & Barnum Bailey in May of this year," said Juliette Feld, chief operating officer of Feld Entertainment, which has owned the circus for the last 50 years.

The announcement, which was made Saturday, came while the circus was in South Florida.

On Sunday, fans at the American Airlines Arena reflected on a show that some people saw a childhood staple.

"I'm a native New Yorker," said Michelle Howard, who took her granddaughter to see the final show in South Florida. "When I was a little girl on 50th Street, it wasn't even in an arena. It was in a building with hay and stinky elephants."

Kulbeer Sanghera woke up to the news of the show ending.

"My wife woke me up this morning and said that this is going to be the last year of Ringling Bros.,'" said Sanghera, who was wearing a giant clown hat while accompanying his two young children and wife. "I was devastated."

But that stunning announcement didn't stop an enthusiastic crowd from coming out Sunday night for the final performance at American Airlines Arena in downtown Miami.

"The show was awesome," said Trina Manning, who attended Sunday's show. "It was amazing. It was awesome."

"I've been coming to the circus since I was, like, 4 years old ... so it was her first time and last time," said Dana Amuial, who took her family to the circus.

The longest running circus in history isn’t a stranger to controversy.

Several animal rights groups repeatedly criticized, picketed and sued Ringling Bros. for its treatment of the animals.

The animal rights group PETA spent years petitioning against the treatment of circus animals.

The Humane Society of the United States, a longtime critic of the show's animal welfare practices, acknowledged that Ringling Bros. has made changes over the past century and a half, but maintains the changes didn't happen quickly enough.

"It's just not acceptable any longer to cart wild animals from city to city and have them perform silly yet-coercive stunts," the society's president and CEO, Wayne Pacelle, said in a statement Sunday.

"I know this is bittersweet for the Feld family, but I applaud their decision to move away from an institution grounded on inherently inhumane wild animal acts," Pacelle said.

In 2016, the circus chose to remove all of its elephants from the show and placed them in a preserve.

"Removing the elephants from the touring units, we saw a very sharp drop in attendance, much greater than we anticipated, and that's led us to this decision because the business model is no longer sustainable," Feld sad.

"I'm sad that it had to take 146 years, but better late than never," animal rights activist Annie Pearson said.

Meanwhile, Howard said she was floored by the recent news.

"If the elephants are being mistreated, then I could understand, but they have to substitute the elephants for something," she said.

Ringling Bros. has made recent changes to its traditional lineup to capture the attention of more attendees.

Just this week, the first-ever female ringmaster, made her circus debut in Orlando.

The full cast of the circus is between 250 and 300 people. With three performing units, the circus visits about 115 cities each year.

Ringling Bros. was founded in Baraboo, Wisconsin, in 1884 by five of the seven Ringling brothers.

The family ran the circus until 1967 when it was sold to Feld Entertainment, according to the Wisconsin Historical Society.