Talent or Torture? Alligators in shows

At the outdoor show today there was a show about alligators and snakes. It was for entertainment purposes. It's kind of like people watching NASCAR. Sitting in baking sun for hours isn't fun, they're all waiting for the crash and burn. At a gator and snake show, the adults are all watching to see if the handler messes up and gets bitten.

So I sat through the gator show and I felt bad for the gator. They goaded it to make it open its mouth and jump and move around. If you were a gator, would you like to be kept in a coffin size box then yanked out into bright lights and poked? Of course not. On the other hand, they claim that the gator had been taken from someones home and that because it was 4 feet long or longer, it generally would have been euthanized. My immediate thought was, if I were the gator, I might have chosen euthanasia over that life. The handlers then stated that they "show" a gator for a couple of weeks, then the gator is sent to a preserve to live out the rest of their natural lives. That sounds better. I guess a few weeks of torment verses being killed might be a fair deal for the gator.   And I hope that maybe all the kids in the audience will learn to respect these animals and if they ever get a chance to see one in person and then know better than to try to feed it or get too close. So overall I decided it's not too much torture as long as what they said about it being released into a nature preserve is true.