Ben, can you imagine sending skunks, opossum, and squirrels etc. all the way to Japan. Also, not the gentleman asked if they could guarantee Rabies in the skunks. LOL Seemed like a pretty knowledgeable organization the Tokyo Zoo in 1962
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Letter from the Tokyo Aquarim ordering animals--1962
Posted by
Wade G. Burck
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Incredible stuff you have Wade! I'm going to assume they really wanted a promise that the skunks were rabies free and were asking about access to rabies vaccine... Wonder why they wanted all those skunks? Have to think the mortality on weanlings in-transit for a couple days via air through Korea was significant. Have you collected the price lists from those old dealers? My dad got exotic animals for his carnival exhibits and school shows through a well known dealer named Henry Trefflich. When I was ten, or eleven, or twelve most of my "collection" were opossums, or skunks, or raccoons snatched from dens. There were a couple fawns found in the woods and such. When I hit twelve my dad started paying me for working at the carnival, and in the winter I started trapping muskrats. Suddenly I had cash flow to buy animals. There was a dealer, an old man in St Stephen, SC named Mitchell who had a place called Trail's End Zoo who sold me my first venomous snake, a southern copperhead for $5. It came in a box via regular mail and I hid it in my bedroom closet...because my mother didn't want venomous snakes in the house.... (Imagine!) There was a place called Thompson's in Florida that put out a wonderful list and sold me a couple armadillos, and the same Anderson's in Texas had coatamundis. (Always wanted one, but there were already raccoon living behind the sofa.) My dad's cougars came from a farm in MN that also sold black bear cubs and wolves, but we had a sun bear for quite a few years that was just plain nasty and I could never sell anybody on the idea of another bear. The slickest of the exotic reptile dealers back then was a guy named Hank Molt in Philly who sold me a boomslang, a highly venomous rear-fanged snake from southern Africa for $10. I had my mom convinced it was harmless until I made the mistake of bragging to somebody over the phone that a boomslang bite had killed Karl Schmidt, the famed Chicago Field Museum herpetologist. I think that's about the time that my "closet" collection was discovered. There was a dealer named Mack in LaPlace, Louisiana who ran a business called The Snake Farm who sold me my first cobras when I was 13. I had to get a friend to drive me to the airport to pick them up, because the dealer wouldn't guarantee live delivery via regular mail in the winter. My dad bought african pygmy hedgehogs from the same guy and included them in the "classroom zoos" he sold to schools where he did animal shows in the winter. There are hundreds of exotic herp dealers now, but only Mark Lucas in Florida is left of those "old school" animal traders. CITES rules doomed most of them.
The old dealers and the old roadside attractions left a lot to be desired when it came to animal care protocols, but I dare say they inspired a generation of zookeepers, animal trainers, circus guys, zoologists, and behaviorists. One thing that animal liberationists fail to understand is that there are a whole bunch of in our 40's, or 50's, or 60's now who have been around exotics most of our lives, never asked to get rich at it, and still take pride and pleasure in shoveling shit, scraping cages, preparing diets, and finding way to see to it that our charges thrive while under our care. I'd wager the pleasure you've gotten in the arena in front of an audience is nothing compared to the pleasure you've found in feeding, watering, cleaning, and training, and just sitting around late at night watching the animals that depend on you. Despite the crap that goes with it, somehow at 50 it's as much fun, as fascinating for me as it was at 12. We're lucky. We got to grow-up to do exactly what we wanted to do when we were kids.
Ben
Ben,
You are dead on about those guys and places "wetting the appetite" as it were. Remember the Tea cup Monkeys? For 19.95 you could have your own genuine squirrel monkey. I used to buy Fur,Fish, and Game just to get address to send for price lists. I kept my nanny goat and her twin kids, in my bedroom closet, because I thought it was to cold outside. I went swell for 3 day's until my mother smelled something, and thought I had dirty clothes under the bed.
I think the problem came with the animals when there were so many of those places, and the line between, zoo, fur farm, circus, animal park, etc. became blurred. Oh course, we didn't care how the animals were kept. We didn't know how they were supposed to be kept. I was only interested in acquiring one of each.
Swear to God Ben, I never thought I would be old enough to talk about the good old day. Worse yet, tell my boys how much better things were in 72. I thought my father was nut's when he told me how much better it was in 32. My Grandfather thought it went south, at the start of the 19th century.
Best,
Wade
Gotta laugh. I remember those twenty dollar squirrel monkeys very well -- frequently advertised in Boy's Life. My mother drew the line on monkeys in the house, though my dad had rhesus monkeys now and then. Later in Florida I cared for a large colony of squirrel monkeys made up of "donated" animals that I'm sure started out as mail-oredr pets. The males could be pretty aggressive when they landed on your head and started biting at the ears and forehead.
You're absolutely right. I think the majority of those dealers were probably awful when it came to husbandry, with enormous mortalities. The few that I saw first hand certainly were. Trefflich dealt with zoos so his place in New Jersey was well run, but the mail-order dealers had chicken wire pens and boxes in a barn or outbuilding. And I imagine that many people who bought exotics never figured out how to care for them and they died. But then again I've known quite a few people who bought spider monkeys or other primates when they were kids and kept them healthy and well cared for for the next twenty-five years. For a long time there was a gentleman in Detroit who worked as a machinist for Ford who had an incredible collection of new world primates, many of them other people's discards. I'm glad that kind of trafficking in wildlife is mostly gone, but at the same time I think we would be poorer if we never made exceptions for passionate amateurs. With avians it's the hobbyists, not zoos who learned the mechanics of reproduction in a plethora of the Psittacines. I don't know if we grew up in the good old days, but we were lucky enough to grow up at a time when all those old books from the 1930's and 1940's by the collectors and the circus guys and the zoo guys were still gathering dust in the library for the handful of us who checked them out ten years after the last reader. Today they're long gone. And it might be said that if you'd never kept your goats in your bedroom closet you wouldn't have gone on to work tiger in Madison Square Garden. It spoke to how you felt about animals.
The night that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon I was a kid and we were working a fair in Schuyler County, NY. I don't remember a damned thing about "The one great step for mankind." I do remember that I spent the night in a pile of hay watching a Welsh pony give birth to a foal later named "Splashdown." Now THAT was interesting.
Ben
And exactly the same thing was happening on the other side of the world! Snakes in the bedroom, kestrels, wedgetail eagles and red foxes in the back yard and folks who were quite convinced that they had brought an imbecile into the world!
From there, the circus was the logical next step - for me anyhow. But when I started up my own circus and used my own name for it's title my Dad spat the dummy and disinherited me.
My Mum, in the latter years of her 92 year life would ask me [hopefully] "... when are you going to get a real job?" She felt that she could never brag about my line of work to the neighbours!
Now, at 61, I wouldn't change a day of it. But because we no longer have the opportunity to keep unusual animals [ due to draconian laws and pressure from do-gooders] I have to make doubly sure that my grandkids get all the opportunities that I had so that they can make informed decisions about their animal training futures.
On a different note Wade - I spent some time today with Capt. Fritz W Schulz, the last of Alfred Court's trainers/presenters. 97 years old and with a better memory than me who is 36 years younger than him! He had a program from this year's Circus Krone featuring a photo of the son of a gentleman that we were discussing a few weeks back. Unfortunately the son is a carbon copy of the father.
Steve Robinson
Australia
Ben - Back in those days I was advance agent for Robert Perry's family circus. The night that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon I had unknowingly booked the show into an Air Force Base residential village - an Air Force Base that was vitally involved in the whole space walk thing. Not surprisingly, NOBODY came to the circus that night and my circus career could have ended then and there.
Steve Robinson
Australia
Steve,
A good advance man would have made the connection. Or were you also the advance man. LOL Often getting out of town fast, just naturally makes you the Advance man in the new spot. LOL
Welcome, I see you found the link. Come back often.
Wade
Steve,
"Spat the dummy!!!" That's almost as funny as "take to the water". I truly believe Aussies are the most creative linguists in the world.
In regards to the trainer Fritz was referencing, I think one of the greatest down falls of out profession has been emulating things of old. Some people like Mark Gebel are the fruit of a tree that is so great, that they will always be compared to it, no matter how well they do. Other's like the the person in question, are luckier fruit. No matter what they do, it is better then the tree. But they choose to not fall far, and are as frail as the tree. Sad and a dredge on our profession.
Wade
Steve, always thought it would be great fun to spend a season on a show in OZ, even just spinning floss -- but I think you're too kind in describing the animal regs as merely draconian. I've never seen a place that worked harder to criminalize possession of even the most common wildlife with each State/Territory seeminly trying to be tougher than the next. Can't even blame it all on animal liberation. Sometimes I think it's the madness of clerks operating an authoritarian bureaucracy. And it isn't just animals in entertainment, it impacts science badly as well. My ex-wife is a herpetologist living in Cairns. She works on the taxonomy of sea snakes up in the straits and in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Her funding comes from a grant scheme from national fisheries and she has to jump through hoops for permits and is constantly fearful of running afoul of the law.
Your moonwalk story is a laugh. Can only imagine playing a RAF base on that day of all days was an exercise in futility and madness
Ben
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