Sunday, June 8, 2008
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A Blog designed for discussion of topics related to, but not limited to, Circus, Zoos, Animal Training, and Animal Welfare/Husbandry. Sometimes opening up the dialog is the best starting point of all. And if for nothing else when people who agree and don't agree, get together and start discussing it, it will open up a lot of peoples minds. Debate and discussion even amongst themselves opens a window where there wasn't one before.
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4 comments:
It may have been common place for keepers to go in the exhibits with some bears. Back in the early 60s the Cincinnati Zoo bear keeper, the late Vernon Oswald, told the story that the old keeper would go in with the American black and European brown bears for cleaning and feeding. Vernon had just begun as a bear keeper and was on his own when, during a spell of hot weather, a newspaper photographer showed up with a big block of ice. The photographer asked Vernon if he'd go in with the polar bears and sit on the ice predending to read the paper. Vern thought bears are bears so he went in the enclosure and posed as the bears stood nearby. He was in the paper the next day and the old keeper told him that he didn't go in with the polars. The longer Vern worked with bears, the luckier he realized he was.
Jim,
A while back somebody suggested that bears must be tamer then tigers, because you always see old pictures of people with the bears in the zoo, and not too many with tigers.
I suggested that bears were some of the first cage animals a zoo had, as they were readily available, and easy to keep so they tried it. By the time they got tigers and lions, enough people had been hurt by the bears they thought it best to just say out of everybodys cage.
Wade
Tradition of trained bears in Europe goes back a very long way. Pre-dates serious big cat training by many Centuries. I suspect for a long time in zoos black bears and brown bears, while maybe not rained to perform were at least taught to tolerate a certain amount of contact. When I was a kid it was amazing how many people in rural northern Pennsylvania had black bears caged in the back yard, or maybe beside a filling station with a big sign. They were almost all at least trained to walk on a leash. And these were show biz trainers by any stretch.
I should add. From 1915 until 1920 Raymond Ditmars, the the Curator Reptiles at the zoo, and thereafter curator of mammals as well used money from Andrew Carnegie to set up a film studio in the park, editing film at his home in Scarsdale. Ditmars made a number of documentaries -- none as it happens on reptiles -- and in 1919 used the Polar Bears in the park to shoot a film on polar bears. Ditmars took stock footage shot in the Arctic, added footage he shot himself at the zoo, and even built several arctic "sets" to create shots he wanted and couldn't find in actual arctic film. I presume there was some bear wrangling involved. Twenty years ago I tried to find some of the Ditmars footage, but none of it still existed in the archives at the park. Presumably it went to his estate. However a couple years ago reference to the films appeared on the IMDB, so possibly some of the work has been preserved.
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