The Cultural Evolution of Big Cat Shows in the Circus

The Cultural Evolution of Big Cat Shows

     The study in this case is the phenomenon of wild animal shows, specifically big cat exhibitions of the genre still popularly recognizable in the erroneous term “lion taming,” but usually involving mixed species, especially tigers, and a male or female trainer/presenter alone in the cage with the animals. The modern version of this performance genre dates back to 1833 in the U.S. and it is today an “endangered” species of performance and a morally and politically contested tradition. To grossly oversimplify, the big cat show has undergone a gradual evolution from applauding the human performer for simply getting in and out of the cage alive, to histrionic displays of bravery and dominance, to more and more gently cueing the animals to perform carefully taught “tricks,” now referred to by trainers as “behaviors.” Regardless of the ethical stance one takes on animals in entertainment, any activity this dangerous, this expensive and time-consuming and this difficult  requires explanation beyond a tendency to enact patriarchal dominion and Anglo-imperialism (J.M. Davis 2002) or a spectacular response to anxiety about human superiority in the wake of Darwin’ s new theory (Goodall 2002).[1] The precarious survival of the “big cat act” has complex economic and historical roots, as does the campaign against it. The protest has backfired at crucial turning points in the history of the genre, but now more than ever threatens to relegate the icon of the “lion tamer” to the once under-erasure status of blackface minstrelsy, which has in recent years has been at last acknowledged by historians as central to the formation of American popular entertainment.

     The “product” of wild animal shows is what the audience sees; the “instructions” are the actual signals, training routines and performance structures used by trainers and performers. Thus there are two simultaneously evolving lineages of practice and representation to trace in the memeplex of wild animal shows. The distinction between the two lineages (product and instructions) is analogous to the difference between functional and causal representational content. The distinction may often seem counter-intuitive as to which is causal and which is functional. In the circus as in all areas of show business, the image cultivated for the public’s consumption works at different levels, but the demographic of the addressee is usually very clear, as when female trainers are depicted in advertisements in a way that sexualizes their performance. Circus historians always have to dig deeper than publicity and oral tradition to learn which stories are true, which are apocryphal, and which are traditional, in that the same kinds of stories are applied to various clowns, trainers, acrobats, showmen, etc. Besides deliberate use of stories that have “survived” in oral tradition, there must be a great deal of unconscious selection going on with these tales by the time they become sub-genres. The oral culture of the circus provides an “inside” and “outside” code for distinguishing members of the “tribe.’ Circus hierarchies have been inherited but also change over time, as evidenced by the decline of big cat trainers as stars in the post-Gebel-Williams circus. As a kind of tribe, the circus passes lore vertically along the isolated meme pool of the circus. Outside the circus, stories adapted for “horizontal” public consumption are parallel to the performances themselves in that they are the “product” of the cultural inheritance being passed down vertically within the traditional knowledge of “how” to do circus.

            In the wild animal shows, the most general difference between instructions and product transmission is the apparent behavior of the cats as framed in performance and the actual operational conditioning at work behind it. For example, a common “bit” near the end of big cat shows involves one of the cats refusing to leave the arena. The actual reason the cat will not leave is that the trainer is standing in front of the exit pathway. When the trainer asks politely and makes a bow or other respectful gesture he or she is actually stepping out of the exit-way and allowing the cat the distance needed to maintain the appropriate “fight or flight” distance from the trainer.[2] The cat will then appear to the audience to be responding to the gesture rather than the now open pathway. Many trainers have incorporated the “uncooperative animal” meme into their acts, a meme that is traceable directly to the equestrian tradition, as are many other practices in large animal training and showing. The earliest example of this common circus meme seems to be a comic routine, called in England since the 1770s, The Taylor Riding to Brentford, to which Phillip Astley added the subtitle: The Unaccountable Sagacity of the Taylor’s Horse.[3]  In the context of big cats shows, the uncooperative animal act was initially used in the Beatty-style “fighting act,” by training certain snarly cats to strike and growl at him when he approached their pedestals. Beatty knew from experience what excited audiences, but he also wanted an act so dangerous that he never had to be worried about being replaced. His earlier Polar bear show (inherited from the Hagenback show) was actually more dangerous than his lion and tiger combinations, but because bears have a more benign cultural image (another meme with a long lineage) Beatty adapted to the big cats and the sure-fire audience reaction to what trainers of the period called working “wild” in the trainer’s parlance, in which the actual danger is less than it seems but there is maximum performance of what appears to the audience as the spontaneous wildness of the  animals. In the nineteenth century most acts “worked wild” and were often were called “hurrah” acts, a sort of chaotic parade in which the cats were rushing about wildly, jumping and growling, but kept in constant motion. Beatty’s cats were taught to enter this way for many of his shows, but the practice is now extinct in live shows.

In the 1930’s, when circus star Clyde Beatty was at the peak of his fame and popular success he was introduced by ringmasters as “the world’s foremost subjugator of jungle brutes,” along with other similar epithets of dominion.  In the 2001 season Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey’s advance publicity for tiger trainer Sara Houcke billed her as “the Tiger Whisperer.” The RBB& B responded to a marketing perception that family audiences wanted a “kinder, gentler wild animal act.” No animal trainer since Günter Gebel-Williams (who retired in 1990) had received so much mass media publicity. Sara was in print ads, television commercials, and even a mildly S&M glamour spread in Details magazine, sans tigers.[4] In interviews she emphasized that the audience would see the close relationship between her and the tigers instead of merely a series of stunts done on command.  After Sara’s first year with the Blue unit of RBB&B Circus, the flood of publicity ran dry. Within two more years Sara Houcke, bearer of a distinguished circus surname and a good deal more than fifteen minutes of fame, had quietly disappeared. What happened? Was she a victim of hype or overexposure? Did marketing misjudge the audience’s change in taste, or was it just that when presented with a kinder gentler animal act, audiences found it dull? [5] I will return to this question in conclusion.

Presentational encounters between humans and wild animals have always been sites of enactment for the opposition of Culture and Nature, but the steel cage of the circus arena has also been a socially contested site, where attitudes towards and ideas about wild animals are tested against cultural production.  Animal rights activists and many advocates of animal welfare, including some trainers, feel that the wild animal act has long since reached its historical zenith.[6]  Yet millions of people continue to attend animal circuses worldwide each year, and trained wild animals appear in films and on television more than ever, although their performances and bodies are increasingly altered or “enhanced” with computer generated images. Today, the circus industry in the United States publicizes their “state of the art care” of animals, while groups like PETA and PAWS proliferate shocking narratives of abuse. While I feel that the wild animal act is not quite teetering on the edge of extinction, its historically precarious position offers a unique opportunity to examine the complexity of factors influencing changes in public taste and adaptive changes in performance practices..[7] 

I have spent the last decade researching the big cat trainers and their performance genre from every angle possible. Remember that here I can barely offer a summary of my findings. No single essay can reflect the amount of data and documented examples required for a memetic investigation. If I were to look at big cat shows from the stance of Evolutionary Psychology, I would have a much easier time of it, since the prehistoric environment of adaptation offers a good “ultimate” explanation for why people have always and will continue to be fascinated by encounters with “alpha predators.” A quote from nature writer David Quammen says it well:

Great and terrible flesh eating beasts have always shared landscape with humans. They were part of the ecological matrix within which Homo sapiens evolved. They were part of the psychological context in which our sense of identity as a species arose. They were part of the spiritual systems that we invented for coping. Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.” [8]

The cultural phenomenon of big cat shows is not explained however, by our atavistic fear and respect for wild predators, or by the cognitive equipment evolution endowed us with.  Memetics is still needed to explain the variety of forms that encounters between predator and prey have taken under the profound influence of human culture. “Natural selection thinking” led me to pay the most attention to the most widely distributed popular culture because I was looking for common themes in mass circulation. The subject matter I looked for included not only representations of circus performers and trainers but also of wild animals in general. My sources have included published books on every aspect of circus life,[9] including hard to find but numerous biographies and memoirs of trainers; [10]recent scientific studies on the health and welfare of circus cats and elephants today,[11] popular magazine and newspaper articles;[12] publications produced by the circus industry and animal training professionals[13], as well as publications of animal rights organizations; and unpublished material from archives and personal interviews. [14] I compared these with more specialized and elite cultural artifacts such as scientific publications, and while it was no surprise that the content differed strongly along these lines, I did not expect that the differences would be so consistent.

Attitudes toward wild animals have been influenced by a wide range of powerful memes and dominant memeplexes, from the biblical concept of Dominion and the arguments of Enlightenment philosophers, to popular song, fiction and cinema, television shows and documentaries, cartoons, comics and children’s literature, zoos and the news media. Performers have historically capitalized on all of these memes to draw attention to and bias the audience through costume, names, music and gesture. Isaac van Amburgh, the first internationally known “lion tamer”, incorporated the use of Biblical iconography most famously, wearing togas and cloaks, and enacting narratives of divinely granted dominion in which the power of faith over animals made the deadly but cowardly beasts cower before him and lie down next to lambs in the cage. The actual reason for the behavior of Van Amburgh’s cats was intimidation with crowbars, but the “Daniel in the Lion’s Den” meme was an extremely successful promotion and became his iconic image in portraits and posters. Despite the pseudo-religious posturing, Van Amburgh is remembered in circus lore as the father of the American “fighting act,” which is usually cited in opposition to the European approach in which the cats are put through performance memes borrowed from equestrian display. The “picture-acts” in which the cats posed in formation and did carefully executed leaping and standing behaviors were only possible with the development of training that did not use intimidating force, but rather rewards and concern for the animal’s health. These methods are traditionally associated with William Hagenbeck, an animal dealer who began developing the method between 1887-1889 after his brother William was killed by tigers during a performance. After the Hagenback methods began to spread, there does seem to be a general evolution toward trainers spending more and more time with their animals, and this has refined their observations and understanding of animals’ psychology. Most trainers learned their craft from a combination of imitation and directed learning while on the job. In America today there is only one accredited program for professional wild animal trainers, and the profession itself is dominated by women. [15]

The memetic aspects of my research are helped by the traceable lineage of European and American training methods and show styles. Circus history is rich with examples of performers copying each other’s acts or trying to compete by adding more and more dangers and challenges. Fliers and daredevils are particularly prone to a kind of runaway selection once competition becomes heated, but trainers also compete in having the most cats in the cage at one time, the most different species in one act. Feats that register as impressive to both audiences and trainers seems to clearly have an adaptive advantage, e.g. the increasing number of cats used in “lie downs” and “rollovers, a particularly difficult trick to manage since the cats are assuming vulnerable positions which correlate with their instinctive submission behavior. Circus families pass down vertical cultural inheritance and most trainers began as apprentice/assistants, called “grooms” in Europe, again from the equestrian tradition, but almost always referred to in American circus as “cage boys,” emphasizing their low status and reminding them of their manure shoveling duties.

What were the selection pressures for the content of wild animal shows? Public opinion, certainly, as circus has historical both pandered to and cultivated audience tastes for dangerous stunts. One interesting thread consists of changes in the costuming and music used. Nineteenth century trainers often used military uniforms and band marches as accoutrements, a practice that was essentially what evolutionists call a “founder effect” in that Phillips Astley and other circus pioneers has cavalry background. In the 1930s Beatty was famous for his “white hunter” costume with pith helmet. Mabel Stark wore a tight fitting white leather suit, which had practical applications as well as sexual and symbolic associations.[16] The Charly Baumann/ Gunter Gebel-Williams school of European born trainers wore spandex and sequins and used popular music, giving their dangerous acts a light touch and framing them as pure entertainment. Spangled tights were used by lion tamer George Conklin as early as the Civil war period, but the theme of his act was clearly based on dominance, as a banner over the lion den read “Conklin is Our Master.” Conklin is often cited as the first to use an ordinary stool or chair to confuse the cats and keep them at a distance. The “chair, pistol and whip” became part of the lion tamer iconography when Clyde Beatty combined them in his live and motion picture appearances. All of these framing devices: wardrobe, music, and gestural style, were memetic adaptations that catered to changing audience tastes and perceptions of both animals and trainers, keeping the steel cage in the center ring and near the top of the circus hierarchy for decades.

Representations of animals and trainers have been more consistently ambiguous than I anticipated at the beginning of my research.  Both negative and positive recurring representations have been much more complicated and nuanced in novels than in movies or other mass media.[17] Movies and pulp fiction about the circus are historically replete with representations not only of vicious animals but also of vicious people who lord over or have unnatural affection for animals because they cannot interact socially with other people. Circus people have long been stereotyped as outsiders and misfits, but the narratives of delinquent cage boys and wicked alcoholic trainers have been particularly consistent for over a century.  In some cases these “bad trainers” are contrasted with “good trainers” who nevertheless maintain their dominant positions in the cage culture (and their lives) by intimidating the cats. In the last few decades the “bad trainer” meme has adapted to fit into the memeplex of animal rights, resulting in its reduction to an uncomplicated, iconic image of cruelty that has been extremely successful at replicating a politically correct but unexamined reaction to the use of animals in entertainment. The circus has retained much of its wicked and worldly image in popular culture, although today, people are more likely to see a circus narrative through television or movies than a live circus or even a televised animal performance, once a staple of the (almost extinct) television variety shows that were once broadcasting juggernauts.

Traditional circus has managed to survive waves of public resistance and social and economic change by adjusting to different venues and shifts in audience tastes, but it has always been a high-risk venture for financiers and managers as well as performers. This makes the circus an especially sensitive barometer of these changes in public taste and audience composition, and it also makes the circus an easier target for animal rights groups than the massive film industry or the many smaller “backyard” menageries and roadside zoos that feature wild animal shows. The major change in the venues and location of circus audiences occurred in the 1950s when the larger shows ended their tent tours of rural areas and small towns and began to perform in more sophisticated urban arena venues. Historically, British and American circus audiences have been consistently composed of predominately lower middle or working-class spectators. On the other hand, the demographics of PETA, for example, are upper middle to affluent. Working-class and rural attitudes towards animals have always been more utilitarian that those of intellectuals and those with the leisure time to devote to various “reform” causes.

PETA has been so successful at transmitting the “bad trainer” meme that for many people I spoke to, it filters out all but the most negative information about training or use of animals. For these people, training is a priori, a bad thing. There is no mention in any of the PETA literature I have poured over that addresses what would actually happen to the big cats and elephants that are currently performing. Contrary to the popular romanticized vision of the wilderness, big cats have always shared territory with humans. Nature comes before culture, but the concept of nature as pure presence is a cultural product of civilization. There are no remaining habitats for any species of big cats that are completely beyond human influence or active management, and very few legitimate refuges for “retired” performing animals.

.Accusations of cruelty and protests against animal acts were not new in the 1980s. The 1920s saw the rapid rise of reformers like the Jack London clubs, usually cited in circus histories as causing the ban on cat acts in the 20s. Jack London’s Michael, Brother of Jerry, published in 1917, aroused a reaction no previous condemnations had. Whether or not London actually saw brutal training procedures is open to serious question. Much of his description is almost verbatim from a bitter satire written by Maurice Brown Kirby entitled “The Gentle Art of Training Wild Beasts.”(Everybody’s Magazine 19, Oct 1908). [18] London was suffering from uremia and serious depression and opium addiction he labored in agony to finish it before he died.” Boyce Renseberger in the NY Times wrote that London’s polemic against trainers converted more people than all his books dealing with socialism. In 1925 RBBB announced that all acts containing big cats has been “discarded because the management recognized that in many quarters there is a decided aversion to the presentation of trained wild animal acts which convey to people the suggestion of cruelty in handling and training.” Parents objected to brining young children to a show in which men or women entered beast cages (n 163 NY Times March 1925).  John Ringling personally didn’t like wild animal acts, and did not allow them in his circus until 1919. For him it wasn’t because of any consideration of the animals but because the cage and chute dominated the arena and were difficult to break down. Only the public’s interest and the fact that his brother Charles Ringling liked animal acts allowed for them in the Ringling owned circus. The rising of the Reformers however gave him an excuse to ban the acts. The print media editorialized, urging the other circuses to follow Ringling’s example, but they didn’t. It’s hard to gauge if this earlier wave of protest was really strong enough to influence anyone in the circus business or audience. In any case it left the door open for the other large circus organization the ACC, to specialize in wild animal circuses. Their success eventually pressured Ringling to end the ban.

Most animal trainers and animal rights activists  hold and express diametrically opposed versions of “the truth,” both claiming their own view to be informed, compassionate, and even reasonable. I qualify ‘reasonable” because both trainers and ARAs have ultimately utopian goals that if explicitly stated seem impossible and eccentric to mainstream sensibilities. The philosophical bottom line of the animal rights movement is a utopian vision in which humans would have as little effect on animal life as possible. [19]  From this point of view, all training and inclusion of animals in entertainment is, a priori, cruel. Yet the reply of the culture of wild animal trainers is that they are committed to the equally utopian ideal of positive, mutually beneficial interaction between humans and animals. For the trainers this interaction consumes the greater part of their everyday life, demanding an uncompromising level of commitment if the animals are to be presentable to the public in entertainment contexts. Animal rights activists counter that spectators at the circus or cinema see only a distorted and denatured image of humiliated and enslaved creatures that bear little resemblance to animals in the wild.  The great majority of people find themselves somewhere between these extremely contrasting positions, concerned about the welfare if not the rights of animals, but as likely to become vegan and give up their pets as they are to become intimately involved with wild animals. More than in any previous period, popular culture today continues to favor and perpetuate negative images and narratives of trainers, a recurrent theme in the endlessly rerun Simpsons, as well as in the news media and talk shows. Hooking into powerful memes, the politics of animal rights has infected the discourse of animal welfare with the effect of unforeseen and usually unpublicized results, including the deaths of many performing animals.

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[1] See Janet M. Davis, The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top,  University of North Carolina Press, 2002; and Jane Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin, London: Routledge 2002. See also, Paul Bouissac. Circus and Culture: A Semiotic Approach. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1972: 106, in which the semiotician decodes a greater variety of role-playing and symbolic relationships represented or alluded to in the big cat acts.

[2] H. Hediger, The Psychology of Animals in Circuses and Zoos, Dover Books, 1968 ;( 24-125).  See also Paul Bouissac, “Behavior in Context: In What Sense is a Circus Animal Performing?” in Thomas Sebeok and Robert Rosenthal (eds.) The Clever Hans Phenomenon: Communication with horses, Whales, Apes and People, New York, New York Academy of Sciences, 1981, (24).

[3] A.H. Saxon, Enter Horse and Foot: A History of the Hippodrama in England and France, New haven, Yale university Press (30-31).

[4] This was not the first time that a female animal trainer’s attractiveness was exploited in circus publicity, but the targeted audience was never so blatantly invited to stand in for the tigers!

[5] The RBB&B Circus shifted its now minimized publicity attention to Mark Gebel-Williams, whose act in most respects resembles that of his father, with whom he performed from a young age.

[6] Sharon Rendell, Living With Big Cats: The Story of Jungle Larry, Safari Jane and David Tetzlaff. IZS Books, 1995. (191-193.).

[7] A major research project, the University of Michigan Genre Evolution Project, is currently testing a wide range of possibilities for evolutionary cultural analyses. The project, (under Rabkin and Simon) justifies its choice of the Science Fiction story as a genre for very practical reasons; the lineage can be easily traced through the extant magazines etc, and their letters columns give more than demographic information about reception. The increasing presence of female writers in the genre and the advent of special effects movies have been shown to have very specific effects on the direction of variation. I strongly suggest anyone working in cultural evolution compare her own strategies and categories of change to the Michigan project in detail.

[8] David Quammen, Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator In The Jungles And History Of The Mind. W.W. Norton & Co. New York, (2003), 3.

[9] Reliable and recent firsthand accounts of circus life include: Bruce Feiler, Under the Big Top: A Season with the Circus. Perennial, HarperCollins, 1995; Charles Wilkins’ The Circus at the Edge of the Earth: Travels with the Great Wallenda Circus , McClelland and Satewart, Inc. Toronto, Ontario.(1998).

[10] A small sampling of trainer biographies: Bonavita, Jack, “How I Am Became A Wild Animal Trainer,” The Delineator 74 (Sept. 1909); 254; Lucia Zora, Sawdust and Solitude.  Boston, Little, Brown & Co. 1928. Alfred Court, My Life With the Big Cats. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1955; Alex Kerr, No Bars Between, London, Cassell and Co. (1957); Clyde Beatty with Edward Anthony. Facing the Big Cats: My World of Lions and Tigers. Doubleday and Co. (1965); Jimmy Chipperfield, My Wild Life.  G. Putnam’s Sons, New York, (1976); Damoo Dhotre and Richard Taplinger. Wild Animal Man.  Taplinger Publishing Co., New York (1973); Sharon Rendell, Living With Big Cats: The Story of Jungle Larry, Safari Jane and David Tetzlaff. IZS Books (1995); Günter Gebel-Williams with Toni Reinhold, Untamed: The Autobiography of the Circus’s Greatest Animal trainer. New York, William Morrow and Co. (1991).

[11] C. H. Nevill and T. H. Friend. The behavior of circus tigers during transport. Applications of Animal. Behavioral Science. 82 (2003.) 329-337; J. L. Williams, and T. H. Friend. “Behavior of circus elephants during transport.” Journal of. Elephant Managers Association 14 (2003)8-11

[15]  A student’s journey through the Exotic Animal Training and Management(EATM) program at California’s Moorpark Community College is chronicled in Amy Sutherlands. Kicked Bitten and Scratched New York, Viking Press, 2006.

[16] For example, the meme of the trainer Mabel Stark’s white leather suit had an effect on the audience (sexually titillating, symbolic of purity undone by a tough leather exterior, etc), whereas the functional aspect of the white leather suit was entirely practical. Before wearing the white leather, Mabel Stark wore a similar black leather costume. The tightness and the slippery hard leather surface were advantageous in keeping the tigers from being able to catch her with their claws or teeth. Regardless of whatever symbolic or eye-catching effects the suit had on the audience, the black tended to show the light colored semen of the tiger, who often ejaculated during the “wrestling” act with his trainer, whereas the white leather did not show the semen, which even in the Roaring Twenties of the circus was deemed unseemly. Nevertheless, despite this visual precaution or because of the rumors about it, Mabel Stark’s act has been remembered as “sexualized” in circus lore, fiction and undoubtedly in an upcoming feature film biography starring Kate Winslet. based on a fictionalized biography cited elsewhere and directed by Sam Mendes. The fill seems to have been held up for several years after Roy Horn was attacked by a tiger in the Mirage theatre, Las Vegas. Word of progress on the film has only recently resurfaced.

[17] Notable are two recent novels: Robert Hough, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001 for which a film adaptation is planned; and Sara Gruen, Water For Elephants, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2006. One of the most realistic and nuanced depiction of big cat trainers ever is Edward Hoagland’s Cat Man, written in 1955 and reprinted by Arbor House (New York), in 1985.

[18] A bitter satire by Maurice Brown Kirby “The Gentle Art of Training Wild Beasts.”(Everybody’s magazine 19 (Oct 1908) pgs4350445. The first thing to break is an animal’s spirit, and this had to be done with a club. Animals he wrote” are not taught, they are pushed and shoved and mauled and whipped and dragged and choked and tortured into tricks.” Ethics are out of place in the arena. So is sympathy. The animals has neither, Why should the trainer be affected by them?”