Fritz Schulz--Ashton's Circus 1960

http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=49657

This is a unique movie clip from 1961 on British Pathe. After the sheep fair, at 36:00 is footage of Ashton's Circus and the birth of Leopard cubs on the show. At 46:76 is a quick shot of Fritz Schulz. As was sop back in the day, there is an immediate effort to "pull" or take the cubs away from the mother for hand raising. Interesting insight into how an animal was dealt with before the advent of squeeze cages. You will note that the mother was roped and then sedated. Why she was sedated and removed with the cubs, I have no idea. Fritz was a well known former Alfred Court trainer, and it looks like he continued the standard Court practice of having a second person in the cage at the back of the ring. This practice is still very strange to me, as an "American" trainer because it is a practice that rarely, if ever was/is done in America. It is traditionally a "European" practice first seen extensively in America with the Court acts on Ringling. The practice has been explain eloquently by the few practitioners of the style today as "the second person is in the cage to move the the prop's".

Myself personally, I think it illustrates what caused the circus animal training profession to "flounder" and as is often quoted, "it's the same old, same old. For decades and decades and decades animal acts never changed. Trainers just did what they had been taught to do by the previous generation. Costumes changed, music changed(eventually), and presentation styles changed but for the most part the acts and the behaviors taught to the animals stayed the same. Trainers thinking out of the box, attempting to train different behaviors, regardless of what the past generation tells you is possible or not possible is what allowed the public to start seeing different act's. The greatest trainer in the world will sometimes fail in their attempts at training new behaviors, but because they are always trying, attempting to push the envelope they will succeed more often then they fail. That's where we get "never before seen" which is then emulated and copied. Michelangelo created, forgers copied.