Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Exotic/barn yard act--Can anybody help with a name. I believe they were at Monte Carlos in 2006
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Wade G. Burck
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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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7 comments:
I don't know who this couple is but I have some photos of this act saved to my computer and I think it looks pretty interesting. Especially the "totem pole" pose (from bottom: donkey, goat, monkey, chicken). I have also seen photos of this couple presenting a baboon act.
Joey,
A lot of things, done right can indeed be beautiful. How about you, do you think the public knows the difference?
Wade
Maike and Jörg Probst.
RE: Does the public know if it's done right.
With the Olympics coming soon I'm getting ready to watch the diving. I'm certainly no gymnast or competitive diver but I'm pretty good at predicting the scores. I count the spins and watch the splash. Small splash = good score. Most people probably do the same thing watching animal acts. If the animals look well cared for, everything's clean, and the animals and trainer perform smoothly without visible stress the act looks good. If there are a lot of animals or some unique tricks the "score" is higher. It's more complicated than that but the public knows what they want to see.
Jim,
There is also a "little" thing called a standard, or what makes a dive good that makes it easier to watch, judge and enjoy.
Wade
Point taken. If you're presenting certain behaviors there's a standard, or probably a generally accepted idea, of what it should look like. Even a non-horse person such as myself can appreciate a good liberty act. For sea lions, some barely hold a ball on their nose while others real balance it.
One drag on standards is that I wouldn't like to see it lead to "homogenized" acts -- everything starts to look alike. We've all seen some excellent, intuitive training done by people who didn't know what couldn't be done or the "standard". It doesn't happen often but occasionally we find a gem.
Jim,
Neither would I suggest that the "improvising" be taken out of animal training. But there are many behaviors that are standard like a sit up, and in your field the ball balance, liberty acts I would think would be a hind leg walk, elephants a head stand. Something new, great, or unusual would be judged on it's own merits, then as will inevitably happen it will be copied. Now it can have a standard set. I also suggest if you had watched a couple of lousy diving competitions without a standard, you may have lost interest, and never look at a good one. You may assume they are all lousy.
Wade
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