This chapter considers big cat acts trained by women in the 1890s and early 1900s in relation to the acts of male trainers, and to the broader context of values in the natural sciences. Live animal acts now competed for audiences with other types of exhibitions, including museum collections of dead specimens. Female trainers remained anomalous within an alignment of training and the natural sciences as they continued to be evaluated by older 19th-century ideas of animal responsiveness to kindness.

The imperative to hunt, collect, study and preserve animal specimens for museums, zoos and menageries remained a thoroughly masculine activity and competitive ideas of scale and species numbers surreptitiously became incorporated into contests between nations. An admirer of trained lion acts and taxidermied display, American president Theodore Roosevelt went on African safari on behalf of the natural sciences. Meanwhile, in trained acts, women in particular conveyed a misleading impression of gentleness in artificially naturalised poses with wild animals who had been trained out of their natural behaviour.

Feminine care

The female animal trainer constituted an unconventional social identity, and recognition of her training achievements was undermined by prejudice. Social beliefs about an innate nature forestalled recognition of women as trainers of fierce animals. Instead, their acts received mixed reactions and were viewed with suspicion, even by male trainers. The animal act thus displayed contradictory human gender identity values.

Madame Louise Morelli was a well-known trainer working with a leopard act for Frank Bostock c. 1897 in Europe, and in the USA by the early 1900s, performing at Luna Park, Coney Island.1 She was probably the trainer of the leopard act, which had five or six animal performers. A studio photograph suggests that there might have been a mixture of leopards and jaguars. Morelli wore a full-skirted, long white dress indicative of the fashion of the 1890s, and she was seated, her feet resting on one animal lying down, surrounded by five leopards on pedestal seats of varying heights. The presence of the pedestals provided the act’s apparatus and the calmness of the seated leopards in their respective and varied poses indicated a new type of trained animal act.

Frank Bostock describes Morelli as:

The emotional qualities attributed to Morelli were polarised with those accorded the leopards; frail femininity was contrasted with animals deemed ‘fiends by nature’. While admiring of her daring and self-control, Bostock did not expect a woman to subdue leopards who were judged as an enemy within nature. According each species a temperament, Bostock admits that it was wonderful to watch leopards doing feats: ‘to see four or five do so with one small woman is a marvelous sight’. He seemed surprised that a woman could work with them. Morelli spoke to the leopards in French and Bostock attributed her management of the act to their responses to the tone of her voice – he implied that it was soft. If female interaction was gentler and softer, the female trainer was perceived as weaker and less heroic.

Although female performers had worked with trained horses and other animals throughout the 19th century, and in circus from its earliest days, some animal acts remained acceptable for female presenters while others drew a degree of criticism. In the 1880s domesticated animals in dog and pigeon acts appeared in circuses everywhere, presented by female trainers such as Alice Fontainbleau, Madame Felix and Madame Eliza (Elise) Fillis, Frank Fillis’ second wife.3 Female presenters routinely appeared in novelty acts with a mix of performing dogs and monkeys; for example, Mademoiselle Carlini at London’s Royal Aquarium and Crystal Palace in 1886 and 1887 and at the Agricultural Hall. By the mid-1880s, Leoni Clarke’s ‘Happy Family’ act consisted of cats, monkeys, rats, mice and canaries. In that act, the cats walked over the other performers sitting on a cord, and the rats travelled in a miniature train. At one time Clarke’s business also presented a wrestling lion.

In contravention of gendered restrictions on dangerous activity, women had appeared in cage acts in family-owned menagerie businesses for 50 years, and they continued to work with a full range of animals. For example, in the 1890s Mademoiselle Sherizade [sic] appeared briefly with the Bostock and Wombwell’s big cats, and Madame Telzero appeared for the menagerie with wolves.4 By the 1890s, however, such acts with women were no longer simply part of family enterprises, and individual performers moved between menageries. For example, a performer known only as Thora presented monkeys for Frank Bostock’s, was also associated with Hagenbeck’s and with Julius Seeth in 1912, and worked with horses for Edward Bostock in 1915.

Morelli and other female trainers indicated a new type of independent female trainer emerging during the mid-1890s who presented a succession of complex tricks by big cats and remained with an act for years. Yet the same act with a male presenter such as Captain Jack Bonavita or Seeth was considered an innovative display of control over the animals, and Morelli probably worked in the same programs as Bonavita. A public perception that an attack was more imminent in an act with a female presenter remained.

The social implications of such an act extended beyond the dangers of proximity and fears for Morelli’s safety. For Frank Bostock, Morelli’s most dangerous trick involved allowing one of her leopards, Cartouche, ‘to place the weight of his prostrate body on a stick held horizontally in her hands and over her face, while she looks up into his glaring eyes’.5 The extent of the presenter’s control of the animal performers in the execution of such a feat was at stake since loss of control might place spectators at risk. Even Frank Bostock, who was familiar with Morelli’s skills, perceived that she was more at risk of attack than male trainers because of her small build. Further, the closeness of the animal to the woman in the feat held other connotations. The animal was standing up full-length on back legs, face-to-face, eye-to-eye with the woman – Morelli had to look up to see the animal – which evoked notions of partnership. A feat whereby an animal performer became a substitute partner placed a female performer beyond notions of protection, rescue and manly chivalry as it also potentially sexualised the interaction.

A contrast between ideas of active wild nature and passive feminine beauty might have enhanced the appeal of the act. Morelli performed with bare arms and neck, so the meshed scars from scratches across her neck and shoulders were visible.6 If it were assumed that a female trainer could not impose the force that a male trainer might bring when problems arose, the examples given by Bostock confirm that it was quick thinking and fast, agile reactions that protected a performer when something untoward disturbed the animal performers. Morelli moved quickly. In one incident the lace of Morelli’s dress brushed against a leopard who was moving towards a pedestal and, surprised, the leopard sprang forward. Bostock says that there would have been a serious accident if she had not caught the leopard with the whip as she jumped away. Bostock seemed to attribute her prevention of the attack to good luck, rather than rapid reflex reactions and experience. There was another incident, however, when a leopard did not leave the cage at the end of the act and, released, sprang onto Morelli’s neck and shoulders. It was Captain Bonavita who rushed into the cage to assist an injured Morelli. Bostock said that considerable effort was made to persuade Morelli to give up her act, but she refused and returned to the act as soon as she had recovered. Whether or not this indicated that women were assumed not to have freely chosen exotic animal training, Bonavita experienced numerous problems with uncooperative animals and there was no similar assertion that he should give up amid the admiration for him.

The details of an act’s content and the sequence of tricks by Morelli and other female performers are scant, and the elements of the routine must be surmised from accounts arising from its disruption. Madame Pianka (Charlotte Bishop) also worked for Frank Bostock and toured in the USA. A photograph, ‘Mme Pianka and her class’, shows five lions placed in a graduated pyramid formation, standard for a trained act at that time (Plate 8). The caption implies that the animals were like pupils. They sit on high pedestals of varied height behind Pianka, standing with her back to the lions, dressed in a full-length elegant white dress. There are five lower pedestals, suggesting that the lions moved between these pedestals during the act. Pianka’s act started with the lions walking in and climbing on to pedestals – she may actually have been working with animals that Bostock trained. In one part she fired a gun with blanks and in another part she put her arm around a lion’s neck in a ‘natural pose’. Of course it was a completely unnatural pose, but the familiarity and casualness of the human and animal posed together suggested interspecies friendship and implied that the lion had become like a pet.7 Bostock includes another studio photograph showing Pianka without the lions and wearing a large hat and a white dress with a train at the back, and carrying a white parasol – that is, dressed to the standard of socially respectable apparel. In one incident when a swipe from a lion’s paw tore Pianka’s long dress and cut into her skin so that she was bleeding, she continued with the act to the end. At the beginning of the act, she had taken into the arena cage a bunch of red roses given to her by an audience member, and a lion who had not reached his pedestal sprung forward at the roses, catching Pianka with his paw. The roses were a new addition to the cage environment, and attracted attention possibly because of the smell or the colour. Pianka threw the roses down; the other lions sprang to look and then went back to their pedestals, and she continued with the act. She fainted from her injury once she was offstage.

The full-length, full-skirted, fashionable dress of the female presenters may have put them at greater risk of incidental accidents than male costumes, but what each wore was also of special interest to the lion performers. An account of the preparation for Pianka’s photographic session to produce the aforementioned photographs, including the one with the lions sitting on their pedestals, revealed that the session had to be extended over three days. Before the photographic session began, Pianka had made a new dress of white that Ellen Velvin describes as ‘organdy, pretty and dainty enough for a fashionable tea-party’.8 When the photography was due to start, the lions did not want to enter the arena, as if they knew that it was not a regular performance. Velvin continues, ‘Trying to rouse them the trainer [Pianka] touched one lion lightly with the whip. He struck at the whip gently with his paw, as though to put it out of the way, his claws caught in the light dress and the whole skirt was nearly torn to shreds.’ The dress was repaired, and the posing resumed, except that this time a lion reached out to touch a new bow that Pianka had added to her hair. An attendant or trainer outside the cage flicked a longer whip at the curious lion, who took this as his cue to get down off the pedestal, as happened in the routine towards the end of the act. The other lions followed him and they would not return to the pedestals, assuming that they had done the act for the day. When the photographic posing was resumed on the third day, the lion at the top of the pedestal pyramid again tried to reach out with his paw to touch Pianka’s new bow, and this was captured by the camera (Plate 8).

Female performers experienced the same problems as men in training when an element of the environment was varied even slightly and the animals reacted adversely or with curiosity. On another occasion, the cage for Pianka’s act had been lost, and she had to perform in a smaller one. The change upset the lion performers and a lioness, usually compliant, refused to go into the performance cage. Pianka ‘coaxed, ordered, and flicked her whip’ without effect, and Bostock intervened to ‘insist on obedience’.9 The lioness obeyed and went through her routine, but Bostock admitted that his confidence made him careless and when he flourished his whip the mate of the lioness leapt 20 feet (6 m) and jumped on him. The lion proceeded to lift Bostock up in his mouth. Pianka was holding a revolver with blanks and fired two blanks close to the lion, who fortunately responded out of habit to the sound and dropped Bostock from his teeth hold. Firing blanks was the cue for coming closer and, combined with Pianka’s other cue when she draped her arm around the lion’s neck, the lion’s resistance dissipated and he took up his accustomed sitting position. As a regular feature of a trained lion act with female presenters and trainers, this naturalising pose on cue had been usefully instigated.

By the last decade of the 19th century the role of a female presenter who ran quickly in and out of a menagerie cage, while attendants stood ready outside, had been expanded to include a routine with dancing action in front of lions sitting up on pedestals. A dancing act was still far simpler for the presenter than concurrent acts with trained feats. La Belle Selica danced and pirouetted in among four lions sitting on pedestals. Bostock claimed that she was only at risk when the lions descended from the pedestals,10 and they were trained to only come down on cue. Once down, however, their behaviour was less predictable. In one performance La Belle Selica was halfway through the dance routine when a lioness climbed down and lay on the ground. Selica continued to dance and verbally instructed the lioness to return to the pedestal, but she only growled and did not respond even to the flick of Selica’s whip. A second lion climbed down and sprang forward, knocking Selica to the ground. She jumped up and rushed for the cage door, avoiding more serious injury. Bostock writes that, curiously, the lions appeared to have forgotten all about the incident the next day. Others gaining prominence within the next decade included Mademoiselle Adgie and her five lions performing with Barnum and Bailey Circus The Greatest Show on Earth (BB), c. 1913.11

A woman who married a male trainer in the 1890s or who took over the presentation of an act worked with trained animals habituated to their routine, although she might later train feats of her own. For example, Hermann Haupt’s first wife, Marguerite, joined his act – he was taught animal training by Claire Heliot (see below).12 Marguerite was reported to have treated the lions kindly, as if they were pets, and she worked in the act until 1912 when she was attacked and fatally wounded. Haupt’s family acts included one with a horse-riding lion.13 The same act with a female, instead of a male, presenter could be viewed differently and some performers accentuated the distinction for effect.

A female presenter who was part of a family or married into a business could be assumed to do the existing act out of love for the male trainer – whether she cared about the animals or not. But women did train animals into routines. The bear trainer Mademoiselle Aurora trained her polar bears to appear and take up positions on stands in the arena, but she kept their exertion to a minimum, so as not to exhaust and distress them.14 Bears had a reputation for being less nervous than other animals, and as Bostock explains, find ‘pleasure in acting and showing off before others’, undertaking the routine whenever there was a spectator. This also made them more unpredictable. In a photograph Aurora stands in front of five large polar bears perched on an arch behind her. She wears a cap, thigh-high jackboots, and a military-style jacket belted at the waist reaching down as far as the top of her thighs – this was a far safer costume than a dress. If Aurora’s presence in the act in the early 1900s contravened gender roles, her costume exposing her thigh tops would definitely have challenged social propriety. The appeal of her act extended beyond the accomplishment of the bears to the burlesque costuming that emulated a male military uniform.

A psychology of kindness

Lion trainer Claire Heliot was described as being ‘frail but fearless’, and ‘mild and gentle’ in a 1905 New York Times feature article,15 although she was actually physically strong enough to carry a fully grown lion, Sicchi, in the act, and to manage a rebellious one. Such descriptions reveal illogical responses to a female performer working with lions. In the New York Times article about Heliot’s appearing at the New York Hippodrome, she was also labelled a ‘timid sentimentalist’. The lions, however, were deemed murderous and the article begins by saying that the lions will not hesitate to kill her. The article describes the instincts and sentiments of the lions at length so that, by association, Heliot’s gentle, mild ‘sentiments’ are made to seem instinctive. An act with a female trainer was not appraised as a calculated demonstration of human will exercised over animals, who had been conditioned to overcome their instincts and behaviour. Instead Heliot was, like the animals, attributed with instinctive reactions.

Heliot was perceived as being kind to the lions and they complied accordingly. Was it simply the expectation that female trainers and presenters would be kinder or were they actually more nurturing? Heliot explains that lions have effective memories and ‘[i]f you are good to lions, they will be good to you. Be positive with them, dominate them, but do not strike them.’16 She did not use force to train for feats in keeping with the ideals of the new training practice.

Heliot was the stage name of Klara Haumann (Huth) from Leipzig, Germany, the daughter of a government post office official and the granddaughter of a minister of religion.17 In April 1897 she created a sensation in Leipzig when she performed at the zoo, assisted by two male attendants, and she later toured widely. The presence of the male attendants may have been socially protective of Heliot’s reputation, as much as a standard defensive watch for sudden or subtle movement pre-empting attack. She was on tour in England with 10 lions and two large hounds by 1901. The touring act included a simulation of a dinner party scene with the lions seated at a table to be served raw meat by Heliot. The meat-feeding scene was less mentioned in the USA although Heliot explained in detail how she started training lions by hand-feeding them and that practice definitely continued.

Heliot was unusual because there is no apparent link to someone even indirectly connected with Hagenbeck or Bostock’s until later in her career. She expressed a love of lions, explaining that they were beautiful to look at, and she had been encouraged by a zoo director who observed her regular visits to the zoo gardens as a teenager. Her ambition in 1906, however, was to save enough money to retire to a country property in three years, suggesting economic reasons for undertaking the act, although her retirement was also attributed to an attack in Copenhagen when a lion bit through her leg. In 1905 her act had as many as 14 lions and they performed behind a 12-foot-high (3.6 m) spiked arena barrier to music from Carmen. Heliot was described patting the lions and lightly touching the nose of one with a leather whip, although she also carried a steel rod. Three photographs accompanying the 1905 New York Times article, however, reveal Heliot encouraging two lions to walk on a raised platform and a third female lion to mount a rolling barrel, and she poses with her arm around the neck of a lion with a mane. Again the pose undermined any impression of the regimented training used over time to achieve it.

The climax of Heliot’s act involved a feat in which she carried Sicchi, a 10-year-old lion, on her shoulders as she left the performance. It was certainly part of the act in 1905 in New York and in 1906 in Chicago with ‘A Yankee Circus on Mars’. It involved draping the 350-pound (159 kg) Sicchi across her back and shoulders, which was probably achieved by lifting the animal performer off an elevated platform onto her shoulders. Heliot was physically strong, although she explained that she started with the young Sicchi, and her strength grew as he gained weight. The feat was new, although it was also pioneered by Captain Bonavita for Bostock’s and Julius Seeth with Hagenbeck’s.18

The image of Heliot carrying Sicchi is particularly striking because the weight of the lion envelops her body (see cover). The 19th-century notion that wild animal species could be thoroughly tamed by culture, with human sympathy and feminine kindness, is grotesquely enacted in the passivity of the lion in this awkward pose. This demonstration of harmonious interspecies relations belies the considerable conditioning of one unique lion personality to achieve it. The addition of a flag held in Sicchi’s mouth, however, highlights how even Heliot’s trained animal act reinforced ideas of militarised colonial rule at the end of the 19th century, but here as if the animal were supporting the nation-state.

The actions and feats in Heliot’s act demonstrated physical control and she was compared to Seeth; she was also billed as ‘The Lady Daniel’ in a biblical refrain. She performed in the long dresses that were the fashion of the time, including one made of white satin. In one incident when a lion named August bit her and her blood spurted over the white dress, Heliot drove the lions back to their cages, bound the wound with a handkerchief, and waited for a doctor to arrive to clean the wound to prevent poisoning. In New York in 1905 a lion’s claw became caught up in the lace of her dress and when he became disturbed that he could not extract it, she was wounded.19 Velvin includes an account of how Heliot made a clear distinction between a deliberate lion’s bite and accidental scratches, which were frequent, and observes that her skin was covered in deep scars from these. Heliot claimed that a lion in her act would not bite her because she hand-fed them, and even a particularly antagonistic lion did not bite her. Velvin observes how Heliot ‘would take a small piece of meat, and telling each lion to open his mouth would put it inside with her fingers’.20

Statements attributed to Heliot suggest that she felt responsible for the welfare of animals. They were not accorded subjective agency, and Heliot is quoted in the New York Times article explaining that animals such as an elephant revealed how ‘a divine order of things has given his soul into the keeping of man’. She was being attributed an established belief that it was a human moral duty to provide for animals and to improve brute natures. But Heliot’s diary entries explain that while she loved the lions in the act, she was creating performance, contradicting perceptions of an instinctual female nature. Her protective strategies during the act were a steel rod, a whip and a quick exit through the cage door. She once had to delay a performance when the whip went missing because one of the dogs had removed it to a kennel.21 She continues that during a performance when the lion August was in a bad temper, she had to threaten him with the steel bar, and a ‘pretty curly-haired little girl in the front row cried, “Why don’t you push him, lady?” It made me laugh.’ The expectations of handling arising from simpler 19th-century tamer acts lingered, carrying misleading assumptions that lions could be easily touched.

Heliot’s act was trained and the lions were not pushed around the cage. It took Heliot two years to develop a fully trained act by first spending hours in the cage with them, and then teaching them to respond to names and eventually to performance cues delivered in French. A troublesome lion on tour was often omitted from the act for a time. Heliot was more concerned that they would hurt each other in fights, and Sicchi had a habit of taking the mane off any other lion put into his cage. But in the 1905 New York Times article, Heliot’s capacity to work with the lions is attributed to nurturing sentiments, and a quote from Heliot about the accidental scratches on her skin being due to the playfulness of the lions supports this notion. The lions are described in emotive language as embodying ‘violence, rage, fearlessness, hatred, power, a wicked shrewdness, the impenetrable expression of a sphinx, and the instinct for murder . . . [and having] no virtues that are without passion’.22 They snarl and put their ears back in reaction to Heliot, and her conciliatory response is interpreted as being coquettish. The article claims that aggressive lions did not appreciate her adoration of them, but they are, however, involved in a ‘beautiful psychology’. While recognising how human psychologies might manage human–animal relations, the statement reinforced notions about management with kindness and a polarisation between animal aggression and human trust and moral responsibility. James Sully writes that although ‘Animal or Comparative Psychology’, as the study of animal minds had become known, had become a separate field by the 1890s, emotional ambiguity in animal expression and the ‘region of animal instinct’ was still ‘a psychological puzzle’.23 Nonetheless a human psychology of emotions prefigured the contradictory status of the female trainer, since kindness and caring could be attributed to women and calculated manoeuvres went unrecognised.

Heliot raised the profile of female big cat trainers in the USA. She returned to southern Germany when she retired from performance, and was reported working as a hairdresser in 1930.24 Heliot stood out from her contemporaries for the feats in her act. For example, about 1905 in the USA there was an Austrian woman presenter working with five adult lions in an act that supported her widowed mother and sister; there was also a Frenchwoman who worked with a large brown bear who carried her by the neck with his or her mouth.25 The bear act ended quickly as audiences did not favour it; apparently the performer was grieving over the death of her child, and by implication had a death wish.

Even though trained acts were recognised to use aspects of psychology through care and kindness, the women were not attributed an ordered repetitive approach to physical training. A female trainer’s interactions with the animals were based on intangible, socially ascribed emotional attitudes, rather than careful observation and knowledge of species behaviour that might constitute a so-named scientific approach.

Married to the act

The reputation of female presenters who were part of a family business or who married into an act was to some extent socially protected, even though appearing with exotic animals was highly unconventional. For unmarried female performers, a capacity to undertake this work was deemed to be a negation of domestic duties and was interpreted as the dismissal of conventional morality. It denoted ‘unnatural’ female behaviour.

A notion that an animal act had become a substitute for a marriage partner emerged in reports about Tilly Bébé – commentators seemed troubled that her animal act might be diverting her from family life. Bébé was well known for her work with lions in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, and in one commentary she reportedly took over an act at Sarrasani’s circus in which her predecessor had been killed. She travelled with a German circus in Western Europe, including to Sweden. Bébé was described as being unable to ‘tear herself away from her lions’ to marry a ‘Viennese confectioner’.26 Even though she was clearly a professional animal trainer working with more than one species, the notion of Bébé’s fascination with working with lions was turned into a description of how lions in her act behaved like partners towards her. In a description repeated in circus histories, her friend Roman Proske writes, ‘When she entered the steel arena, her lions would behave like lovers paying court to a reigning beauty, rushing to her side and vying with one another for a caress’.27 Proske was admiring of Bébé’s professional accomplishment and reputation, but he also describes meeting Bébé in old age and finding her ill and poor, defiantly making every effort to see lions. If Bébé’s biography provided a moral warning about the fate of socially adventurous females, affection from those wild animals confirmed a woman completely motivated by care and love, which also functioned as an irreconcilable psychological trap. Social precepts that an unmarried woman should be orientated to domesticity and human companionship were undermined and yet, at the same time, a display of affection suited claims of gentle approaches to animals. Perhaps because female presenters were commonly associated with an animal act through marriage, it was Bébé’s own psychology that had to be explained, as if she could not marry because she loved the lions.

Bébé remained somewhat of an outsider, even in the life of the menagerie and circus. Proske acknowledged her reticence with other humans, which possibly added to a perception that she had rejected male suitors, possibly fans. In another account of Bébé, her lions understood her words, but she was made to seem foolhardy as she stretched her hands into the lions’ cage, seemingly to caress them, and was bitten. Paul Eipper reports her saying, ‘Shame on you, what haven’t I already put up with for your sakes! I’ve gone hungry.’28 The lion responded to her comment by licking her wound. The description of the encounter implied that Bébé was devoted but naive, and needed to be more cautious. Bébé may not have been able to continue working with lions or bears because of political upheavals, including World War I and other disruptions to the circus business historically, and the costly economics of trained acts meant that she could not maintain the animals herself. But was there perhaps also an issue in that younger female presenters were more appealing and hired more easily?

A tendency to recount the stories of escaped big cats and minor attacks may have been magnified with female trainers, but there certainly were risks. In a continuation of 19th-century menagerie ethos, the big cat act with a woman in the early 20th century was still about the greater risk. The perception that the animals obeyed in response to female kindness camouflaged that individual animals were amenable to training regardless of the trainer’s gender, and female performers working with trained animals demonstrated the same techniques as men. Male presenters could adopt adventurous action-based costumed identities evoking settings from safari hunting to military battle to visibly demonstrate that they were suitably experienced and in charge of the act. Moreover acts with female trainers in everyday dress camouflaged the direct connection with violent acquisition in colonial lands, whereas the male costumes perpetuated 19th-century references to a covert fighting ethos. In addition they aligned with scientific collecting practices in the early 20th century.

Virile hunter-naturalists

At the turn of the 20th century a sizeable number of animals were still captured from the wild to undergo training, and touring menageries and circuses continued to offer the public an opportunity to view a diverse range of live animal species that corresponded with what was offered by zoos in larger metropolitan centres. The connections between menageries, circuses and the zoos included the movement of animals, supporting the perception of an educational function in all three. From the 1890s a thoroughly reasoned rejection of menagerie ‘wild-beast shows’ and the claim that their captive animals enjoyed their lives because they were fed included the longstanding accusation that the shows did not advance human knowledge.29 Menageries and zoos presented living ‘specimens’, as did trained acts, but both faced competition from natural history collections of dead specimens that proclaimed a more scientific and therefore elevated educational purpose.

The observation of live animals was not the same process as viewing dead specimens. Even though the preservation of living animals logically seemed to offer more scope for the study of animals, large collections of dead specimens came to represent advancement in science. Public interest in taxidermied animal bodies also expanded with increasing viewing opportunities, formerly the prerogative of scientists and private collectors. Throughout the 19th century London’s Zoological Society members expected to be able to dissect a dead lion, kangaroo or elephant once the animal was deceased, and to practise ‘the art of taxidermy’ with any wild animal, irrespective of where they were held.30 Visitors could be influenced by the rhetoric surrounding an exhibition, but this type of knowledge contained emotionally ambiguous attitudes to the life and death of animals.

The dead species displays in museums of substantial size reconfigured longstanding patterns of exhibition and colonial expansionist activity – museums also stored countless numbers out of view. In his history of the museum as an institution, Tony Bennett points out that, similarly, the disordered jumble of the fair and the exhibition, intended to produce wonder and surprise in spectators, was a precursor to the museum that evolved into an institution that invited admiration for its display, its modernist order. Although the ‘exhibitionary complex’ that culminated in museum displays of taxidermied species modelled rationality, its trajectory reached back to the days of ad hoc curiosities on display.31

The protective sentiments now widely proclaimed by animal trainers offset scrutiny over cruelty, and can be contrasted with an absence of empathetic sentiment evident in the hunting of animals in the natural sciences. The latter seemed to perpetuate the uncaring attitudes of imperialistic trade in contrast to the change in animal act values from forceful menagerie handling to careful training. The 19th-century philosopher Henry Salt rejected the way big-game hunters indulged in ‘murderous masculinity’, and the way hunters deemed themselves to be civilised.32 James Anthony Mangan and Callum MacKenzie point out how a hierarchy of masculinities developed in relation to different and earlier types of hunting. The late 19th-century hunter in Africa or Asia provided an ideal of virile masculinity, tested through the contradictory notion of a pleasurable danger of sport and military duty.33 The grouping of hunters emerged out of the expectation that colonial military service would also involve big-game hunting. Regardless, a lack of sentimentality about animal deaths in the process of hunting specimens, alive or dead, transferred to early modernist 20th-century scientific collecting.

The identity of hunter and professional scientist became partially fused by the early 20th century.34 As indicated, books helped to expand interest in hunting in Africa or Asia for anyone with the opportunity or financial means, while the results facilitated collecting. Geographical adventure travelogues with hunting episodes of the 1850s to 1860s were superseded by hunting publications that also contained increasingly larger appendices of species knowledge and scientific categorisation.35 It was hunting as a narrative of dangerous adventure, though, that marked a man as ‘virile’.

The scale of hunting expeditions continued to increase. In India, the British emulated the practice of tiger hunting, associated with Mughal emperors from the 18th century, and Joseph Sramek explains that ‘tigers also represented for the British all that was wild and untamed’.36 Sramek continues that the visual record of photographed British royals beside dead tiger carcasses conveyed assumptions of authority, and were symbolic of the overcoming of fear that made ‘British imperial and masculine identities’. The emotional struggle was implicit to the maintenance of power. As William Storey summarises in his analysis of lion hunting in east Africa:

Some large animals required more hunting skill and there was a hierarchy of masculine achievement in overcoming fear in the big game safari hunt, and it could now be captured by the camera.

Opportunities to participate in the safari adventure attracted influential figures with public profiles and political power. This was exemplified by the expeditions of Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt, who seemed unperturbed about the consequences of hunting. The young Churchill rode the Kenya‒Uganda railway that epitomised modern achievement in the east African British protectorates to meet with district officials, and Theodore Roosevelt provided specimens for a natural science collection. As was standard, Churchill was photographed standing with dead animals, including a rhinoceros that was not found immediately on the grasslands where the train could be stopped. Instead, it had taken the party more than an hour’s walk to find the grazing animals. Churchill explains, ‘killing a rhinoceros in the open is crudely simple . . . you walk up as near as possible to him from any side except windward, and then shoot him in the head or the heart’.38 If the hunter missed and the rhinoceros charged, it took a volley of shots to kill, and the photographed one beside Churchill had charged. In reference to a white rhinoceros causing ‘excitement’, Churchill later explained that ‘to shoot a good specimen . . . is an event sufficiently important in the life of a sportsman to make the day on which it happens bright and memorable’.39 The hunter felt good about his achievement; as if the animal’s life was of no importance.

As a high-profile spectator of trained lion acts and an ex-military man, after serving his two terms, the now ex-president of the USA, Theodore Roosevelt, went on an African safari promoted by a justifiable scientific purpose. Departing on 23 March 1909 he was undoubtedly the most famous of the safari hunters in the first decade of the 20th century. He ostensibly travelled to Africa to obtain specimens for natural history displays at the Smithsonian National Museum, following his father’s example, who had used the family money to fund New York’s Natural History Museum. Theodore had a reputation as a naturalist, and major national parks were created under his presidency in the USA; his own commentary centred on preserving the habitat of wolves and pumas.40 In preparation for the African safari Theodore read a number of the available books on safaris and game hunting in Africa.41 He funded his trip and his son’s with a publishing advance for a series of magazine articles that later became his 1910 book, African game trails. Crucially, Theodore also sought to meet with experienced hunters for advice before embarking on the journey including notably the taxidermist-hunter Carl Akeley, and the most famous hunter of specimens of fauna at the time, Fredrick Courteney Selous, who described some of his hunting experiences in his books.42 Selous visited Theodore in 1905 and his 1908 book African nature notes and reminiscences was dedicated to Theodore, who provided the foreword. Theodore asked Selous for practical information about where to go and what to take on safari hunt and, like Selous, identified himself as a ‘hunter-naturalist’.

An ethos of freedom espoused in relation to frontier regions was associated with Theodore, and frontier hunting that linked notions of manliness with dominance of the environment also identified nations as virile entities. Reminiscent of Farini taking Sam Hunt on his expedition, Theodore took his son, Kermit, who also had a camera. They travelled to Mombassa in British East Africa (now Kenya) by boat from Italy, and the ensuing 73-tent entourage and 200 porters became the largest expedition of its kind at that time. The Roosevelts went inland by train and stayed at well-established colonial properties in east Africa, before venturing southwards for seven months, camping in relative style. The large safari group was reduced in numbers as they continued on to Uganda by train on 18 December 1909 for two months of hunting white rhinoceros and giant eland, and then through the Sudan and Egypt down the Nile. 

The animals that Theodore sought were, ‘in order of priority: lion, elephant, rhino, buffalo, giraffe, hippo, eland, sable [antelope], oryx, koodoo [kudu], wildebeest, hartebeest, warthog, zebra, waterbuck, Grant’s gazelle, reedbuck, and topi’.43 Specimens of all these species were acquired on the safari hunt. Three naturalists were employed by the Smithsonian to go on the expedition so that, Thompson explains, what might have been considered a ‘private junket scheme was transformed into a full-fledged scientific expedition’.44 The preparation and preservation of dead specimens was carried out by Major Edgar Mearns, a retired army surgeon; Professor J Alden Loring, a small animal and bird expert; and Dr Edmund Heller, working on big game. They did not always go on the hunt and most of the expedition’s live specimens came from the private zoo of William and Lucie McMillan.

To warrant the label of ‘naturalist’, a hunter needed to observe exotic wild animals in their habitat – alive. There was some criticism of the impact of hunting on wildlife numbers, which led Theodore to justify his position in private communication. He denies that he is a ‘game butcher’ when he proclaims ‘the chief value of my trip to consist of the observations I was able to make upon the habits of the game, and to a lesser extent, of the birds, smaller animals and the like’.45

In exacting detail Theodore writes about killing a lion:

A hunter’s right to kill large numbers of animals was being questioned at that time, if not a hunter’s right to shoot with, as the graphic description reveals, full awareness of the internal damage, but not the suffering, of the dying animal. The animal was viewed like an enemy who needed to be killed.

The process of observing animals in their habitat did not inhibit killing nor did it arouse empathetic regret, and instead attested to the strength of an assumed right to hunt. Among a number of Theodore Roosevelt’s other contradictions was the paradox of an American president, who was a former colonel from the Spanish‒American War and who instigated a stronger, larger, American navy, being awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.47 A meeting in Kenya with the taxidermist-hunter Akeley, who was hunting elephants for New York’s American Museum of Natural History, involved Theodore and his son Kermit in the shooting of at least three adult elephants and a young one for this museum collection. The pair later watched as several Nandi people were wounded while hunting lions with spears before one male lion was killed. It is recorded that Theodore was pleased that only two Nandi were injured by a rhinoceros and a leopard in the British East African section of the safari trip. The expedition seemed more focused on the quantity and competitive size of the collection, and there was a noticeable lack of sentiment about dead animals and the extreme cruelty of hunting.

As indicated, Theodore had been impressed by Captain Bonavita’s act with lions. It was evident that acts with live animals were an influence on this milieu, encouraging diverse masculine activities out of quasi-scientific safari practices. In lopsided emotional responses, there was praise for bravery and courage, but the expectations of gentleness in the treatment of animals in captivity did not transfer to hunting, which was without similar emotional impositions. Since entering a cage with lions was not really an option, someone with the resources backed by skilful hunters and locals set out to test himself carrying a state-of-the-art gun to come face to face with a live wild animal, where possible, in nature.

Patriotic services

The Roosevelts’ expedition claimed to have found new specimens, perturbing the British colonials who expected that the British Museum should take precedence – ‘an international race of sorts developed’.48 National interests were extended to collecting dead specimens. The way that museums competed was reminiscent of competing 19th-century menagerie collections.

The dependency of menagerie trade, animal acts and ethnographic exhibition on the colonial empire became transparent as trainers, in turn, joined patriotic missions of animal acquisition for military campaigns. When Lorenz Hagenbeck returned to Germany following the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair and circus tour, he was instructed by his father Carl to supervise the acquisition of 1000 dromedaries for the German army in South-West Africa (Namibia).49 There, Germany was suppressing a rebellion by the Herero people (1904 to 1907), who, trying to avoid the violent conflict, died in their tens of thousands from starvation. Joseph Menges purchased the dromedaries for Hagenbeck’s in ports on the Red Sea, assisted by Grieger, who loaded them onto the ships. The German government doubled the request to 2000 dromedaries. At considerable cost, the group shipped 2000 dromedaries plus saddles and 80 Arab camel-handlers on five ships to the German colony and landed them by pontoon onto the shore.

Lorenz writes that with this expedition his father believed he ‘had achieved something momentous in cultural history’.50 Such animal acquisition business was directly serving the colonial nation’s military strategy. At that time Lorenz visited the Somali leader Hersy Egeh in Somaliland, and was the guest at a riding, fighting and dancing display: ‘Egeh rose to his full chieftain-like height in his picturesque stirrups . . . [and as] the whole village yelled: “Aya hovoh,” spears flew into the air’.51 Egeh became an intermediary in the bargaining for dromedaries, receiving his own cut of the purchase price. He was a guest for the opening of the Stellingen Animal Park on 7 May 1907, appearing in full war paint on this official occasion. He brought along a prospective marriageable daughter for Lorenz, who declined the offer, later noting that she had hair dressed with mutton fat. In 1908 Emperor Wilhelm II visited Stellingen wearing a naval uniform. The crowd at the animal park awaiting the royal cavalcade included school children and war veterans from the 1848–51 and 1870–71 campaigns, who were greeted by the emperor. He said to Lorenz, ‘I already know your animal park so well from the cinematographs . . . my brother has told me that I really must have a look at the real thing.’52 The brass band played Saro’s ‘Battle potpourri’, punctuated with rifle and cannon fire, and Fritz Schilling presented an act with a mixed group of big cats. It was a conjurer from India who was especially favoured by the royal spectator. But then, the animal park was also a type of fantasy presentation.

The Hagenbeck animal show functioned like a national emissary. After the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair, Hagenbeck’s was invited by Argentinian government officials to stage a show with animal acts in Buenos Aires in 1909, for the anniversary of the republic’s centenary of nationhood.53 ‘Exposición Carlos Hagenbeck’ combined circus, menagerie and ethnographic shows. The circus presented an 18-piece brass band, Richard Sawade’s tiger act, Fritz Schilling with 20 polar bears, elephants, sea lions, chimpanzees on bicycles, horses and zebras. There were Somali performers, and masked dancers from Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

The trained animal act, which had become emblematic of modernist innovation and cultural improvement and progress additionally provided a symbol of national achievement and diplomacy and was therefore worthy of inclusion in a celebration of nationhood in the new century. During one performance, Sawade was attacked by a tiger, Nik, who generally behaved like a pet dog.54 Rudolf Matthies fired gun blanks at Nik. The tiger, hit by the cartridge cap, stopped, and Sawade finished the performance injured in the shoulder and upper arm; despite blood-poisoning, he recovered. The accident in trained animal action within a larger performance of nationhood provided a reminder of an inherent suppressed violence in both. An inclination to attack in a confined space with other species was controlled through the training regime, and it became disrupted if an animal performer decided not to cooperate.

Claire Heliot was on the ship accompanying Sawade to the centenary celebrations but seemingly not as a performer. Her presence at a celebration of nationhood confirmed trainers’ pre-eminence within modernity, but also her inability to represent such ideals. A perception of kindness might not have generated the appropriate solemn tone for an occasion in which the animal act was expected to be a modernist symbol of scientific progress, as well as the controlled improvement of nature. The dominance of wild animal species remained a male prerogative on an official occasion.

A capricious science

Training encouraged animals to suppress fighting instincts. Was training scientific or did this association arise from an alignment of animals within the broader scientific sphere of activity? The idea that caged large exotic animals could be effectively managed by knowledgeable care and fair treatment formed part of the training ethos developed from the 1880s and 1890s. This was no longer a vague notion that animals might submit to handling if they were treated kindly; there were clearly defined behavioural approaches to training. Some could be trained against their natural inclinations, and rhetorical claims about gentle training and unnatural poses that seemed benign appeased criticism. Those animals who were not obedient and could not be coaxed, according to human understanding of species behaviour, were no longer handled in public view. If an animal were capricious and confrontational, he or she was simply removed from an act.

Frank Bostock explains that ‘the trained animal is a product of science; but the tamed animal is a chimera of the optimistic imagination’.55 He explains that trained animals were not tamed animals. The training of live animals in the first decades of the 20th century was assisted by the animal training manuals of Carl Hagenbeck and Frank Bostock, which contained information about animal husbandry. The manuals do not fully explain how knowledge of species movement and reflex reactions was applied in training and contributed to the claim of scientific training. It was the application of systematic approaches based on accumulated knowledge and practices, often undisclosed, that facilitated training.

The trained big cat act was fully integrated into the 20th-century circus ring, removing visible evidence of forceful containment, which parallels how orientalist fantasies with elephants belied their treatment. Performance hides the physical consequences for animals from the public. Yet Paul Eipper needed to defend animal acts in circus by rejecting trainers who lacked control, and he reiterates apologist statements about self-regulation with the standard argument that the cage life of animals was not cruel because most zoo animals have the same amount of space.56 Judging by this defensiveness, animal acts were still being criticised. He continues that in the circus, cages are very clean and the animals immaculately groomed. Interestingly, Eipper’s commentary focuses on the circus acts in which the animals displayed what could be interpreted as recognisable emotions, and he gives comparatively briefer accounts of the impressive balance of sea lions and the skills of bears.

The public perception may have been that any animal of a species was fully trainable, but in reality some individuals were more cooperative than others and amenable to doing complex feats – an uncooperative animal was a liability to an act. Animals could also be accidentally startled out of a trained routine. Eipper describes his observation of Matthies’ act with Carl Hagenbeck’s circus. In one incident a sudden running movement by two spectators had upset a Bengal tigress about to undertake a leap, so she slipped from her pedestal. The tigress’ nervousness provoked a Sumatran tiger to attack a third, Ulla. Matthies took control of the situation and achieved obedience from the 15 tigers, getting them to return to their routine. At the start of the day in rehearsal the tigers were given free time to do as they pleased before Matthies called softly, ‘That’s enough, children! Take your places!’57 Matthies scratched each between the ears and they sniffed his hand, as he explained that the Sumatran tiger was well behaved during rehearsal to avoid being punished with endless repetitions.

In another incident in performance, however, as the band played the ‘Triumphant march’ from Aida, it took 20 seconds for the same Sumatran tiger to grab Ulla, who swiped him out of the way, causing him to leap onto her back, sending them both to the ground. Eipper writes, ‘The audience is frightened. Women begin to scream, panic is in the air.’58 However, Matthies intervened and the tigers took their places. The uncooperative Sumatran tiger was banished from performance, and was eventually sent to a zoo. Banishment from his peers and familiar way of life might well have been another type of cruelty.

The trained animal act did retain a mystique that echoed that accorded to Van Amburgh, except that by the 20th century the mystique had been extended to the animals. John Clarke claims that while there was ‘fear and distrust of animate Nature’, a trainer’s ‘power over animals’ was a ‘gift’.59 Alternatively, in their innocence, animals ‘know’ or sense the emanations of human emotions and can become like mind-readers, but should be approached as ‘equals’ in friendship. Since animals were outside culture, they had a sensory purity and innocence that allowed them to see through a trainer’s social guile or guardedness.

By the second decade of the 20th century the touring menagerie accompanying the circus had become the lesser business. The shift from exhibition and simple feats to the complex tricks of trained animal performances meant that these became synonymous with traditional circus, as if they were part of the ring show from the beginning. The heyday of trained elephant and big cat acts happened during the first half of the 20th century and these acts continue in circus today.

The modernist circus became synonymous with an act in which a lone man or woman holding a stick and/or whip entered the arena inside a tall barrier spanning the space of the circus ring to present a group of big cats in human-like action. The animals, including elephants, seemed to move freely in the arena during the 20th century, masking how the performance was underpinned by regimented discipline and highly practised routines. But the animal act displayed cooperation, submission and obedience. A circus trainer or presenter’s approach combined training with specialist knowledge, but not in a way that revealed a suppression of the defensive fighting behaviour of other species. The rhetoric about the science of training, underpinned by the necessary financial resources, was consolidated into three human principles: careful attention, patient perseverance, and the watchful selection of animals with the potential to become performers.