For Clean Raul--New Goat Recipe

Last Wednesday we had a cold rainy night and the next morning a number of my neighbor's goats died. This one was trying very hard to die. I took it to my barn and tried getting it warm. I called a friend down the road that raises goats. She brought over some milk and said we needed to get him warm fast or he was going to die. She said the quickest way was put him in the oven.
Yes, after I realized she was serious we headed to the house.
Recipe is as follows:
Wrap goat in towels.
Preheat oven to lowest temperature in this case was 170.
Place goat on lower rack and bake with door open like you would if you were broiling.
When temperature gets up turn off oven.
Check your goat every 20-30 minutes. Feed him formula. Rub him. Turn him over and put back in oven and start procedure again.
This goat slow-cooked for about 5 hours.
When the buzzer goes off you have a healthy goat that I've named, Twice-Baked.

And,
Thank God for Self Cleaning Ovens.

Jody:)

Courtesy of Jody Cambell

Circus Wagons not at Circus World Museum in Baraboo

Anybody interested in the beautiful wagons at Peru, Indiana should check out Bobby Cline's great blog with some great Peru circus history:

Sawdust and Spangles

That's a sad deal that there is rust leaching through the paint on a "museum exhibit"


I believe these wagons are in the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota. It seem's they got the "lesser" wagons and I am sure there is a "wild" story of circus infighting to explain how that happened.

Carl Hagenbeck and Unknown Keeper

I wonder who the sea lion keeper is with Carl in this picture. He seems to be in many pictures with the sea lions over a long period of time.

Circus/Zoological Menagerie History 101--Get your notepad's ready kiddies.

This is the Frigidaire-Polar Bear float in the 1934 Hagenbeck Wallace street parade. It is the same wagon used to haul sea elephants Goliath and Colossus around the big top on RBBB in 1928-31 and perhaps Sells Floto in 1932. It was in Peru because it had been sent up there with Colossus for Sells Floto.

It was a promotional deal for Frigidaire. One of its refrigerators was mounted right behind the drivers and the rear of the wagon held a multisided cage with a polar bear inside.



Courtesy of Professor Richard Reynolds

Circus/Zoological Menagerie History 101--Get your notepad's ready kiddies.

Wade - -

Since your questions were posed so far back in the blog, I thought I would answer them with a fresh start. I will lead off with this photo of Colossus taken by Eddie Jackson at Sarasota in 1930. Jackson always wrote on the bottom of his negatives identifying the subject. Here he wrote "Colossus."

In Sarasota the sea elephants were not kept at circus winter quarters but instead lived on St. Armands Key, which was being developed by John Ringling. Stockade-like pens were built on the shore and extended out into the salt water so that the animals had both a beach to lie on and water to swim in. That is where Jackson took the above photo.

According to Lillian Burns, daughter of Owen Burns, John Ringling’s real estate partner, the sea elephant enclosure was in Panzy Cove, the dredged out, narrow canal separating St Armands from Lido Key. The enclosure wasn't ready when the show got back to Sarasota at the end of October, and Goliath had to reside in the winter quarters rail yard, inside his combination stock-tank car, until about 20 November 1928 when he was taken out to the beach. Somewhere I heard or read that real estate promotion was one of the reasons the sea elephants were installed out on St. Armands. At the time John Ringling was more interested in selling property on his islands than in running his circus. Fact is, he was desperate to sell lots because the 1926 Florida land crash had put him in a difficult position.

The colorized postcard you earlier posted shows the sea elephant and keeper in this water front stockade.

The earlier photo of the animal with his chest propped up on blocks (passenger cars in the background) shows Colossus at the old Bridgeport WQ in 1928. Though those quarters had been vacated by the show in 1927, RBBB still had some stuff there. Colossus was in Bridgeport until December 1928 when he was sent to Sarasota to join Goliath.

John Ringling bought Colossus as a back up in case the original Goliath croaked. Sea elephants have proved difficult to keep and the show had invested a ton in advertising the big seal.

The photo showing the sea elephant in the big top is of Goliath (I think). The keeper looks like Emil Warnecke who came over from Hagenbeck/Hamburg with the original Goliath. This wagon had an inclined floor so as to show off the animal. The keeper always stood in front with a bucket of fish. The beast was a huge eater and gladly showed off to get the fish as the wagon circled the hippodrome track. My Mother and Dad saw Colossus here in Atlanta in 1931. When I was a little tyke would regale me with stories about watching the sea elephant reaching up to get those fish.


The photo of Goliath on the wagon also pictures keeper Warnecke. This really shows off the animal's huge size.

You asked about the sand in the sea elephant car. That information came from John Sabo. He was Colossus’ keeper and replaced Warnecke when he went back to Hagenbeck/Hamburg. Sabo later became RBBB's menagerie superintendent.

Here is what Sabo told me in 1967 - -“They (sea elephants) traveled in a stock car with a large water tank in one end. Next to it was a bed of sand for it to lie on. The keeper and several others slept in on the other end of the stock car.”

I do not know of any filtration system in the rail car. Given those less sophisticated times, I am sure they just dumped it out, feces and all, and refilled the pool with water out of one of the circus water wagons. Same was true for the hippo cage on the lot.

Remember, toilets on rail passenger cars flushed directly onto the right of way under the cars. That did not change until about 20 years ago. On circus lots, donniker waste dropped down into holes dug into the ground underneath. “Urinals” (I use that word advisedly) for male circus patrons were nothing but shallow trenches scraped into the ground. When the show quit the grounds those holes and trenches were probably supposed to be covered over, but I suspect that was often left undone. Try any of that today!

During the winter of 1928-29, the original Goliath appears to have been attacked in his salt-water lair by a big fish of some sort. The New York Times (22 March 1929. p.21) said it was a swordfish and that it ran its blade through his shoulder. The late Mel Miller of the Sarasota Ringling Museum told me he had heard that a “shark or something” bit Goliath’s tail. Is there an odor of Dexter Fellows’ press agentry in this?

If it did happen, I doubt it was a swordfish of the Xiphidae sort (the kind we like to eat). It’s my impression that they are game fish, preferring open, deep water, and not likely to have been poking around Goliath’s shallow water pen in the Ringling Isles. A shark is a possibility, but if there were any truth to the Times story, I’d say the assailant was a sawfish (Pristidae). Some really huge examples of that dangerous looking critter have been caught right off piers in the Sarasota area.

Injury or not, Goliath toured in 1929. When he got back to his corral in the Gulf of Mexico at the end of the season, he was “loudly welcomed by his mate Colossus,” to quote BB (16 Nov, 1929), but he didn't last long, dying there later in November. At first the show denied the rumors of his demise (BB, 23 Nov. 1929), but later they ‘fessed up (BB, 4 Jan. and 8 Mar. and 5 Apr.1930 and NY Times, 28 Mar. 1930). Now, it was Colossus’ turn to impress the public, and he hit the road for RBBB’s 1930 and 1931 tours.

I hope the readers will like this.

Courtesy of Professor Richard Reynolds

Zoological Menageries--The Good and the Bad Old Days

The good is what it was, the bad is how it was done. That is the value of history. Learning to replicate the good, while changing the bad.

Zoological Menageries--The Good and the Bad Old Days

Imagine your only contact with animals were domestic animals on the farm, or the native dangerous species observed from a distance, or occasionally killed for food stuff. Now these unknown creatures are actually coming to your town, and you can actually see them, smell them, up close.

Zoological Menageries--The Good and the Bad Old Days

What a wonderful, exotic, mysterious world it was. Imagine being a child and seeing posters/sheets like these. Just magnificent.

For A2

In response to your question, "is Ned better off now?" I will ask you, "better off then what?" That is the "complicated/no easy answer" that is at the front of all animal issues that I mentioned to you. There is a young elephant in the middle of a fire storm in Cambodia, that had his leg half severed of in a wire noose trap. The census is the leg will have to be removed as it was were infected when he was found. One school of thought is that they should euthanize him, and the other school of thought is that the leg should be removed and he should then be fitted with a prosthetic leg, I assume similar to the one pictured here. What do you think? Is he "better off" if he is euthanized? Or is he "better off" with the leg removed, fitted with a prosthetic, and then lives in a sanctuary for the rest of his days? In response to your statement that we speak to different languages, "what is better off." Maybe we can get other responses also, to see if we can all understand.



What happens when a young elephant in Thailand steps on a landmine and is then fitted with a prosthetic leg, and then grows up? A bigger tool for the job!

The world's first elephant fitted with a prosthetic leg is growing so fast that she has had a larger one made for her. Mosha has had a second prosthetic leg fitted. Mosha, now three, was only seven months old when she lost her right front leg after stepping on a landmine. Close to death, she was rescued and brought to the Friends of the Asian Elephant hospital in Lampang, Thailand, where she got her first prosthetic leg in 2007.

Her home in a tropical jungle in the north of the country, near the Cambodian border, is an orphanage for elephants. Her keeper said that before the first leg was fitted she was "depressed, self-conscious and wouldn't socialise". But now the animal is getting more confident and likes to play with the other elephants.

Thousands of Thais have been injured and killed due to landmines, with a recent survey estimating there are about 100 new mine casualties each year. But it is the elephants that are the new symbol of the fight against the banned weapons.