NOTE: there’s just no way around the fact that this is now considered reckless animal abuse, and thankfully has been eradicated around much of the modern world (but not all, sadly). Stark lived in a different time, though… is something that I hope can be considered in this case.

Mabel was thus considered America’s first famous female tiger trainer. Amazingly, she practiced until the age of 79yo, when she was unceremoniously fired when her employer’s insurer dropped her coverage. She died by suicide three months later, unable to bear life away from her big cats.

All credit to u/dannydutch1 for this discovery and the key text & facts. More here:
https://www.utterlyinteresting.com/post/mabel-stark-the-world-s-first-female-tiger-trainer

I can highly recommend Danny’s site, which seems to specialize in controversial figures & happenings across the contemporary era. Always with lots of historical photos!

  • diverging ( diverging@piefed.social ) English
    12·
    23 hours ago

    Stark lived in a different time, though

    Don’t try to white wash terrible people. Even in those times they knew it was animal abuse.

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    Bloody Ruts In Bangor Me 6,000 people were watching the wild animals in the circus. Seven tigers, as docile as 30 year old cab horses, were lounging and limping around a ring where a woman stood, telling them nonchalantly when to stop and go. One lazy, spavined creature growled at the woman with perfunctory rage. Then he and another tiger pounced upon her and lay on top of her biting the woman with their yellow teeth and slapping her with huge limber paws that left two-inch grooves on her arms and bloody ruts across her face. Almost before the people in the audience had time to scream, the lion tamer came over from the next ring and rescued the lady from the tigers.
    She was taken to a hospital to recover from her wounds, while the 6,000 people jabbered with alarm and the tigers were led out of the arena to their cages, looking less decrepit now and licking their muzzles with junglar ferocity. The history of the lady was made public after the accident. She was Mabel Stark once the chief ornament of Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey “cat acts.” In these she allowed herself to be embraced by a tiger something no other woman had ever dared to do. When the Ringling circus gave up wild animal acts because spectators often suspected cruelty to the animals , Mabel Stark was compelled to perform far less hazardous feats, such as descending from a synthetic fire at the roof of the big top by parachute mounted on a horse. Finding this trick too monotonous she had recently returned to her earlier specialty. When she regained the ability to speak after the Bangor incident Mabel Stark assured her friends that she had no intention of giving up her “cat acts.”

    • Tiresia ( Tiresia@slrpnk.net ) English
      4·
      18 hours ago

      When you consider the hundreds of people entertained by the torture of a single animal in a circus compared to the single person enjoying eating the flesh of the innocent, meat eating is much worse for animals than circus animal cruelty.

      Stark tortured a dozen or so animals continuously over the course of her life.

      Assuming the average meat eater eats the equivalent of 2 chickens per week1, and given chickens are tortured for 8 weeks before being slaughtered, the average meat eater is torturing 16 animals continuously over the course of their life, solely for their own pleasure.

      This does not excuse Stark’s torture of animals, nor does it speak against Stark’s cruelty as a person that embraces the torture rather than leaving it to factories. But if you’re eating meat, you’re closer to her than you’ll probably like to admit.

      1: very rough equivocation of a lot of systemic animal cruelty. For every chicken raised, one is thrown in the meat grinder without anesthesia for having the wrong sex. Every farm animal needs to eat, which requires tilling more land than in a vegan diet, which destroys ecosystems, killing the local wildlife. But there are also animals that give more protein per day that they are tortured, diets vary, and they also get a lot of protein from vegetarian products which torture less per gram of protein.

    • JohnnyEnzyme ( JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social ) OPEnglish
      8·
      22 hours ago

      Don’t try to white wash terrible people. Even in those times they knew it was animal abuse.

      If you’d read the post, then you’d know that I’m not doing any kind of whitewashing here. The facts & content are courtesy of Danny Dutch, and I specifically wrote the intro to address this kind of thing.

      That said, I appreciate the added context, as it tends to flesh out what Danny had already found about Stark’s maulings by the tigers.

      I’m curious though who exactly you’re calling a “terrible person,” because I don’t see such a person here unless you’re talking about some kind of overseer boss, or perhaps the circus owners themselves. Ms. Stark by contrast seems to me like someone caught up in this unfortunate situation, weirdly addicted to it, and one who paid a heavy price… many times.

      • diverging ( diverging@piefed.social ) English
        4·
        21 hours ago

        The phrase “lived in a different time” is whitewashing. It’s asking everyone to ignore the evil shit that a person did.

        I’m curious though who exactly you’re calling a “terrible person,”

        The person who chose to attack a tiger with a whip, knowing that it was cruelty to animals.

        • JohnnyEnzyme ( JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social ) OPEnglish
          7·
          20 hours ago

          Then you might as well say that everything across history that might offend someone later is “whitewashing.” The point is that she lived in a time when audiences largely felt these things were okay, and now we don’t, starting with the OP (me).

          You can point the finger anywhere you like of course, but the reality is that this was a show spectacle, whereas nowadays we treat most domestic animals (and wild ones, really) with far more horrific cruelty, but the difference is that we do it out of sight. Ever read about what animal husbandry is like these days…?

          The person who chose to attack a tiger with a whip, knowing that it was cruelty to animals.

          My understanding of these trainers (ideally) is that they used their whips for control, not for the purposes of “attacking” the animals. The object was to use the loud whip-cracking sounds to intimidate the tigers and keep them in obeyance. Attacking them directly would be a fool’s errand IMO, as it would be hard to damage them much, and would quite likely enrage them.

          My attempt was to present an even-handed transmission of Danny’s post, but I guess it’s inevitable that a holier-than-thou type would try to take things out of context and stir shit up here, huh?