Entertainment and Amusement: Animals in the Performing Arts | 215 that is, the ethics of what we could call virtual, as distinct from actual, animal performance, are very hard to determine, because its capacity for harming or improving the lot of actual animals is mediated through such variable and subjective factors as the artist’s intention and skill, and the spectator’s response and interpretation Theorizing the existence of an animal apparatus in performance, Michael Peterson writes: “How are animals made to perform”? Collars reins, bits, whips, good, treadmills are part of this apparatus [ .] “How are animals made to mean?” is a more difficult question, and beyond basic questions of semiosis, this involves abstractions like wildness, nature, freedom, servility, and even “the great chain of being,” or the concept of the soul Thus the ethics of animal performance must be understood in terms of a vast continuum ranging from such unambiguously pro-animal pieces as Rachel Rosenthal’s The Others, which featured 40 actual animals and their human companions, to such obviously destructive or sacrificial pieces as Kim Jones’s Rat Piece, in which three live rats were burnt to death in front of an audience Between the two extremes one finds everything from the magnificent, soul-stirring horses and other animals of the French company Zingaro, or Martha Clarke’s Endangered Species, to the mischievous dog performances of Oleg Kulik, to such deeply disturbing and morally essential human-animal tragedies as Peter Shaeffer’s Equus and Edward Albee’s The Goat Performance intersects most directly with animal rights and animal welfare in the area of pro-animal activist performance Perhaps the best known examples of this genre are the actions of PETA, the international animal advocacy organization known for its inventive and sometimes outrageous use of costumes, props, and human bodies to get its message across PETA activists deploy both the revelatory and the confrontational powers of performance: the former to unveil and expose the hidden abuses of animals in zoos, circuses, factory farms, and laboratories, and the latter to awaken people to the consequences of their unquestioning acceptance of many cultural animal practices For example, in a recent action described on the PETA website, “one of our activists lay on a ‘grill’ on a busy sidewalk, her skin painted to mimic the charred flesh that some people still happily consume at barbecues.” Such performances may seem superficial, but they are in fact brilliantly encapsulated uses of such key elements of performance as embodiment, presence, live interaction in actual space and time, and imaginative engagement with persons, situations, and stories As such, they can inspire conventional and mainstream artists to address animal issues in their performances Debates around the representation of animals in performance of both actual and virtual kinds often center around a phenomenon that has also recently sparked new and important debates in the sciences: the issue of anthropomorphism While developments in ethology have shaken the longstanding scientific prohibition against ascribing mental states and emotional responses to animals, the arena in which such attributions have always been customary, if not obligatory, that of the arts, has of late evinced growing awareness of the fact that anthropomorphism is often an innocent-seeming foundation for anthropocentrism and speciesism This awareness parallels the critique of philosophical anthropomorphism that underlies the new