Résumé :
This article considers objections to the nineteenth‐century stunt in which a big‐cat handler put his or her head between the jaws of a big cat in the context of attitudes to performing animals in the 1890s. This stunt was commonly seen in menageries in the USA and Europe, and a newspaper exchange developed in New Zealand in 1894 between a journalist, Scrutator, and Frank Fillis, the English proprietor of Fillis’s Circus from South Africa touring New Zealand with four African lions and a Bengal tiger. While there was a significant change to human–animal relations in the Euro‐American circus ring over the decade of the 1890s as wild animals were trained to do tricks on cue led by Carl and Wilhelm Hagenbeck’s acts, the controversial Fillis’s Circus big‐cat act in New Zealand seems to have been an older menagerie‐style display. It is argued that opposition was indicative of a nineteenth‐century anxiety about compromising the hierarchy of species and additionally in association with gender rather than a reaction against performances by wild animals and trained acts. Yet the defence offered by Fillis offers an early coherent example of what would later become standard rhetoric about the inclusion of trained wild animals in traditional circus.

Localisation : Traitement documentaire

DOI  : 10.1080/17460650903010733