Circus people can't understand why the animal taming craft, which has been passed down for hundreds of years and was once classified as an "intangible cultural heritage", is now "abusive"; animal protection people cannot accept that this kind of behavior that violates "animal welfare" is called "art". Behind the collision of the two civilization concepts is the change in the way the country manages wild animals, and the fate of rural circuses.
Reporter | Wu Shubin
Edit | Chen
It's hard to ride a tiger
"Don't be afraid." Yin Fuli's hand rested on a slightly mottled iron door, and he told me sideways to follow him when I entered the courtyard.
Yin Fuli, 55 years old, is of medium build, lean and wears a simple and clean shirt and jeans. He was the head of a large circus in the Wanqiao District of Suzhou City, Anhui Province, and had spent most of his life dealing with animals, managing a circus of nearly 200 people and a large courtyard with various beasts, just behind the mottled iron gate.
The world behind the iron gate is quiet, but it shocks outsiders. In the middle of the yard, there is a passage of more than one meter wide, and on both sides are cages made of stainless steel wire ropes, each cage is about ten square meters. A black bear, a lion, and two dozen tigers were locked up in the cage. The tiger is thin, with a short head and short ears, and golden fur that is not shiny, but with its black stripes and green eyes, it still exudes an unofficial majesty. In the middle of it, you can clearly feel more than a dozen pairs of tiger eyes staring at you at the same time. I don't know whether I saw the familiar Yin Fuli or was disturbed by the entry of this stranger, A few tigers that were originally lazy and lying on the ground slowly stood up and paced to the edge of the cage, one of them opening its teeth and rolling out of its throat with a low hissing sound. Yin Fuli walked up to it, reached into the cage and touched its head, and the tiger quieted down. The tigers in the courtyard were all raised by Yin Fuli, the short ones were raised for seven or eight years, and the long ones were more than ten years, "When they were sent, they were still young, and I held and fed them one by one." ”
Stills from "Tiger Brother Tiger Brother"
From the appearance alone, Yin Fuli's home is nothing special, it is an ordinary farmyard located in Taogou Township, Wanqiao District, Suzhou City, Anhui Province. Only by circling around the north side of the house can you find the yard where the bear Crouching Tiger is hidden. Further back, there is a clearing with barbed wire surrounding a circular taming field. Locally, this model is almost standard in the houses of circus leaders.
Everyone in the village knows Yin Fuli's home. Anhui Suzhou City, Weiqiao District is known as the "circus town", circus has been developed here for hundreds of years, Yin's circus is a famous family, passed to Yin Fuli when it was the eighth generation. He founded the Grand Circus of the Orient in 1982, which is one of the best in the local area in terms of scale and efficiency. The summer vacation in August was originally the peak season for circus performances, and in previous years, Yin Fuli, his wife and son would divide into different teams and bring actors and animals to perform in various places. But in the past two months, the national epidemic has rebounded, and the family has had to suspend performances and pull the team back to the village to rest. Three two-meter-high containers were piled up on the side of the road in front of the courtyard, spray-painted with the image of a blonde magician holding a magic wand and a tiger in a fire ring.
Guangzhou Zoo ended a 24-year collaboration with Huang Yingzhi's circus. In the zoo, a 4-year-old orangutan reaches out from an iron cage to communicate with the animal trainer (source| Visual China)
The tiger show is one of the signature events of every circus and is also indispensable for a high-grade circus performance, and people's curiosity and enthusiasm for the "King of the Hundred Beasts" is higher than other animals.
Today, the star animals of the past have become the "burden" of the circus. Yin Fuli told this magazine that the migration of tigers from breeding areas requires the State Forestry Administration to apply for an administrative license for transportation, but in October 2018, the State Council issued a notice requiring strict control of the use of tigers and their products, and since then, the Forestry Department of Suzhou City has never approved the business license for tiger transportation and performance. How to place these tigers that cannot be performed and transported has become a headache for the leaders of the group.
Yin Fuli calculated the account, hired two breeders to clean the tiger house and feed, a total of more than 6,000 yuan per month; each tiger ate at least a dozen pounds of meat a day, usually live chickens, eat beef every half a month to supplement nutrition; if sick, there are additional treatment costs. If you calculate it, the money spent on tigers every month is tens of thousands of yuan. This expense gave Yin Fuli a headache. He was a little gambling, "Don't let the performance can be done, just put it at home, who has the money to feed every day?" If the zoo is willing to receive it, it can be sent for free! ”
symbiosis
Saying that he wanted to "send" the tiger for free, Yin Fuli still instructed the workers to carefully stare at a tiger that was not in a good state. After a lifetime of circus, even if the animal has become a "negative asset", Yin Fuli is reluctant to abandon it.
In the hundreds of years of dealing with animals, the people of Wanqiao have long been accustomed to symbiosis with animals. In the early days, animal performances were a craft that locals relied on to survive. In the historical Wanqiao area, there were constant wars, and Artemisia and Taogou were remote, and the economy was even more depressed. Every agricultural leisure season, farmers often go to the city to sell art to make a living, and slowly begin to simply domesticate animals, bringing puppies and monkeys to perform together to please the audience. Soon, a large number of folk artists appeared near Artemisia Township, who drew relatives and clans in and set up a drafting team to perform everywhere.
More and more people began to perform animals, and after becoming familiar with animal habits, locals gradually trained programs such as "Monkey Pulling Cart" and "Dog Bear Riding". Animals with high understanding and quick learning are people's life-saving straw, "people will starve to death, take sheep and dogs to perform, make some money, and live together." Zheng Guowu, a 67-year-old animal trainer in Artemisia Township, said.
In the long years of getting along, circus people's feelings for animals are complicated. They are tools for making a living, objects that are domesticated, and family members who have cultivated feelings. Zheng Guowu told this magazine that taming animals is the same, no matter what kind of animal, cultivating feelings is always the first step, "let the animals be familiar with the taste, feel that your existence is safe, and be willing to interact with you." He compared it to how to train tigers to jump the fire ring. Food rewards are the most commonly used means. The trainer repeatedly caressed the tiger's back, placed a piece of meat on a high chair, and kept tapping the chair with a baton. Tigers want to eat meat and naturally jump over. Next, the trainer beats the next stool with a baton, and feeds the tiger only once after jumping three stools. Finally, the baton is pointed at a high iron circle, and after the tiger completes the jumping ring, it gives food rewards. After repeating it many times, the iron circle is lit during the day to avoid the fire at night from stimulating the tiger. After skipping one fire ring, gradually increase the number of fire rings.
Perhaps feeling that the explanation out of thin air was not enough, Zheng Guowu took me to the courtyard and pulled a goat to demonstrate. He dragged the rope that was draped over the goat's head and dragged it across the canoe bridge. The goat was still unskilled, trembling and alternating on four legs, walking back and forth through a plank that was only one hoof wide. When it came down from the shelf, the goat stepped on the hind legs and stepped into the crack of the stairs, and its body suddenly fell on the stair shelf. I was a little anxious, afraid that the goat would be scratched by the iron frame, and instinctively took two steps forward to help it. Zheng Guowu signaled me not to move, "Let it rest here for a while, and the steps will be much safer." Sure enough, after lying on his stomach for a while, the goat got back on his feet and walked off the shelf trembling.
The animal trainer's understanding and emotion of animals is different from that of ordinary people. They have their own way of coping with animals, unique experiences and emotions with animals. This experience and emotion allowed them to tame both goats and beasts of prey. Yin Fuli gave names to each tiger in the family, Wei Wei, Yang Yang, and Zhao Zhao, "They are the same as people, no name can not do." The male can give a more powerful name, and the petite tigress can give a flexible name. "The tiger recognizes his smell, and he can smell it to tell which is his own tiger."
Zheng Guowu drags goats to a canoe bridge (courtesy of the author)
"They have been with you since childhood, they all have feelings, and they have contributed to you and made great contributions." If you die, you will really cry. ”
Golden years
Yin Fuli's golden years were spent with animals.
He grew up in his father's circus and began to learn to tame animals at the age of 13. In 1982, the 18-year-old Yin Fuli was so angry that he raised fifteen thousand yuan to buy back two lions, a wolf, a dog, a sheep and a horse, and started his own circus. There are many things that the head of the regiment has to worry about, recruiting actors, arranging programs, contacting business, and unblocking relationships, all of which need to be personally investigated. When he was not skilled in business, he also lost a lot of money, and in the hardest times, he used to sleep in the toilet in the strange countryside.
However, after getting on the right track, circus people have a considerable income. Wife Ma Haiying remembers that in the summer of the early nineties, the circus went to the northeast to perform, and it could earn 20,000 or 30,000 yuan in three months. ”
At that time, there were not many recreational activities available to people, and the circus was one of the cheapest. Yin Fuli pulled the circus from Anhui and went all the way down the seashore, choosing a town or county seat to start the greenhouse performance. The news soon spread to the surrounding area, and someone took the initiative to come to the door and invite them to perform. When performing in Shantou, less than a dollar of tickets sold for more than 300,000 yuan in more than a month. The audience's reaction also satisfied Ma Haiying, "They still don't believe when they hear the advertisement, 'Can you domesticate animals like this, is it true?'" When we finished performing, they were convinced. ”
The "star" black bear in the circus performs on parallel bars (source | Visual China Xiao Xiong photo)
City people like to watch the fruits of human taming of animals, especially beasts of prey. In the classic program of the circus performance, "Lion and Tiger Sitting", a group of African lions and Siberian tigers with teeth and claws were brought into the performance field, and under the command of the animal trainer, the beasts jumped on the iron frame in mid-air one by one. At one command, the lion and the tiger sat down obediently; under the order, the beasts of prey clasped their fists in two front paws and greeted the audience. In programs such as "Feeding the Tiger's Mouth" and "Head into the Tiger's Mouth", the actors put their hands and heads into the mouth of the tiger, took them out, and ran around the performance field to show the audience the unscathed body.
At the turn of the century, the circus industry in the entire Wanqiao district was in full swing. "It is better to walk the three rivers, but the artemisia peach willow", the artemisia ditch, peach ditch and willow ditch in the Wanqiao district are regarded by peers as places to be avoided for circus tours, and even a village has dozens of circuses, and every household is taming monkeys and puppies at the door. Zheng Guowu took out a copy of "Suzhou Circus", which had several folded corners on several pages, and printed pictures of him training monkeys in the village to stand upside down, and a group of villagers gathered around and watched with great interest. Older circusers recall that the circus was so packed that it even needed to use the strength of public security and troops to maintain order on the spot. The only collective circus in Suzhou is the "Anhui Star Circus", deputy head of the troupe Zhang Hongwei told this magazine that in the 1990s, the work of the star circus was a fragrant feast, and too many people wanted to entrust the relationship to come in, "can go out to see the world, the salary is still several times that of other jobs." ”
Around 2010, the development of the Circus of Wanqiao reached its peak. In 2007, The District was awarded the title of "Hometown of Chinese Circus" by the China Acrobats Association, and in 2008, the Circus of Yanqiao was included in the second batch of national intangible cultural heritage protection projects. In 2010, there were more than 400 circus groups in Wanqiao District, more than 20,000 employees, and an annual income of more than 400 million yuan.
In 2010, the 2nd International Circus Arts Festival was held in Wanqiao District. It was Yin Fuli's circus that hosted the festival. It was the highlight of Yin Fuli's circus career, he specially found a media company in Beijing to be responsible for planning and packaging, and invited the circus of Russia, Kazakhstan and other five countries to perform on the stage, and came to an "international circus integration".
Blocked
However, the circus festival, which was originally scheduled to be held every three years, was silently suspended after the second edition. Looking back now, circus people find that the downhill of the circus began at that time.
In Wanqiao, almost every circus leader knows the name "Hu Chunmei". She is the head of the "Save performing animals" project, her daily job is to supervise and report circus performances, although she lives in Beijing, she will go to the zoo environment and circus performances almost every month to investigate the zoo environment and circus performances, "they can't talk, they can't refuse, we have to stand up and help them." ”
Hu Chunmei is in her early thirties, her appearance is slightly immature, she has short hair, speaks standard Mandarin, and her voice is crisp and gentle, but she has a stubbornness. When talking about the concept of animal protection and the work of these years, Hu Chunmei gushed endlessly, and when she talked about the excitement, she would also make an exclamation, just like the university dorm girls talked at night. Such a Hu Chunmei is far from the image of circus artists who are messing around and have quite means.
She told this reporter that she has loved animals since she was a child and studied veterinary medicine at China Agricultural University.
After graduating from university in 2011, Hu Chunmei devoted herself full-time to the public welfare project of protecting animals, and in 2014 took over the "Save Performing Animals" project. She already has a mature method: every day, volunteers will sort out advertisements for circus performances online, mark the time and place, and when the performance date is approaching, call the local citizen hotline to report it. At present, if there are lions, black bears and other wild animals in the circus participating in the performance, if they meet the conditions, the state forestry, public security, culture, industry and commerce and other departments will go through the domestication certificate, transportation certificate, performance certificate and other examination and approval procedures, and put the performance animal into the chip tracking monitoring, can be domesticated performance. Many folk circuses have not received such approval. "When we call for a report, we usually say that according to Article 27 of the Wildlife Protection Law, if you carry out animal exhibitions and utilization, you need to obtain approval documents from the government department, and I hope you will check it." Hu Chunmei blurted out her proficiency in laws and various administrative regulations.
In her day-to-day reporting, she sensed a subtle change in regulatory attitudes. At first, the person who received the report call seemed very strange, after listening to her list of legal regulations, stunned for a while, hesitantly replied with a sentence of "let's go and see", and some people asked in a dazed tone, "Should you not be a foreign force?" "But in recent years, the other party's attitude has been much better, and it will record the time and place that Hu Chunmei said, and sometimes call back to feedback the handling situation."
Most of the circuses she reported were from the Wanqiao district. In 2016, Hu Chunmei came to the circus town and filmed a micro-documentary "Trap" in Weiqiao. "Exposed" the domestication process of circus animals. In the video, two black bear cubs are tied to a window with short ropes tied around their necks, and the black bears can only stand on their two hind limbs, restlessly spinning in place. The trainer on the field wielded a whip and commanded three tigers to raise their front paws and occasionally stab a lazy tiger with a stick.
Zhang Hongwei also knew in his heart that the environment was changing. He confessed that more than thirty years ago, it was inevitable that animals would be beaten among the tamers, and even the tamers would do it at the scene of the performance. "Most people don't react, but if there are foreigners in the audience, they will stand up and shout." Now, beating animals has long become a taboo in the industry, "don't say that the audience can't watch it, whoever gets started at home will also be looked down upon by peers." ”
In July 2017, Wuhan East Lake Ocean Park International Circus debuted, a black bear performing a hoop (source| Visual China Miao Jian photo)
But what circusers can't understand is that animal protectors refer to all domestication as "abuse," including what they consider normal methods of domestication. To understand the difference, in early 2018, Hu Chunmei had a conversation with Huang Yingzhi, a circus leader in Anhui, on a television program. Hu Chunmei feels that circus violates the natural development of animals, and the harmony between humans and animals is created, and she repeatedly mentions "animal welfare" to make animals healthy, comfortable, nutritious, safe, able to freely express their nature and not suffer. "Let the bears that originally walked on four legs walk upright, would they be willing to do these things by nature?" The whip was crackling on the side, how could the tiger feel safe in his heart? "Huang Yingzhi has always emphasized that the people and animals in the circus are like the symbiotic relationship between parents and children of poor families." Without performance, what do animals and people rely on to survive? "Isn't that how the circus animal eats and drinks, treats it when it's sick, teaches it to learn things, and disciplines its children?"
The dialogue lasted 35 minutes, and the two sides were never able to persuade each other. But from the perspective of social management, Hu Chunmei's view clearly prevails. What was once an intangible cultural heritage project has become an industry that does not meet the standards of modern social civilization in terms of concept and management. In 2010 and 2013, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development twice asked urban zoos to "eliminate all kinds of animal performances." In March 2018, more than 300 circus directors across the country issued a joint letter to the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development under their real names, protesting the Ministry's request to suspend animal performances. The joint letter emphasizes that "domesticating animals is not harming animals ... It's like raising your own children. "Animals that lose the stage of performance are difficult to survive, and all kinds of rare animals such as lions, tigers, elephants and so on lose the main material basis for survival."
The joint letter did not receive a reply, but in October 2018, the State Council issued a notice requiring strict control of the business and utilization activities of rhinos and tigers in order to protect rare and endangered wild animals. After the notice was issued, tigers could no longer be transported and performed, and the former "star animals" became the "negative assets" of the circus.
"There used to be such a thing"
At the end of August 2021, when our reporter arrived in the Wanqiao District of Suzhou City, Anhui Province, it had just rained. The village after the rain is quiet and depressed, and occasionally there are elderly people or women holding children sitting idly in front of the house. The village does not see the "taming of animals in the streets and alleys" in the brochure, and people are reluctant to mention the once proud circus performances. In the face of outsiders' inquiries, he always waved his hand and said perfunctorily, "I have long stopped doing that line." However, the occasional roar of a tiger from a high-walled compound and the discarded iron cages piled haphazardly on the open space constantly remind outsiders that this is a "circus village" that is in the conflict between survival tradition and modern civilization.
Some circuses that could not afford to raise tigers began to look for alternative ways out, renting out tigers to other circuses or zoos. The risk of this operation is extremely high, on the one hand, it is illegal transportation and operation, on the other hand, after being put into an unfamiliar environment by the familiar animal trainers, the leased tigers are frequently in trouble. On September 6, 2019, a tiger from a circus in Yuanyang County, Henan Province, escaped from an iron cage during a performance, but fortunately there were no casualties, and this tiger was rented from a taming group in the Wanqiao District of Suzhou, Anhui Province. Another accident in 2021 was much more serious, when a circus in The Qiao District leased two tigers to a scenic spot in Nanyang, Henan Province, to be kept, but the two tigers escaped from the cage, bit the keeper, and were subsequently killed.
These tigers have pushed the circus town to the cusp of the wind time and again, and also made the circus artists gradually lose the hope of reviving the circus.
The pandemic of 2020 is the final blow to the circus. Gatherings have stopped performing in various places, and many circuses are in a state of complete shutdown. Forty-year-old Chen Yang was one of the ones who was washed away in this huge wave. Twenty years ago, when the circus business in the village was booming, Chen Yang, who was born a beast trainer, was no longer satisfied with running with other people's circuses, he bought back two small tigers, a bear and other small animals from the villagers, recruited several acrobats, and pulled up a small circus. Although the size of the troupe is small, Chen Yang has his own way of talking about business: to develop into a small city and avoid competition with the big circus. Real estate is constantly developing in fourth- and fifth-tier cities and even townships, hitchhiking with real estate business performances, Chen Yang's business is also very good, until the last five years, the circus has three performances reported by volunteers, and then stopped by the local forestry department. Counting the transportation costs and breach of contract fees, each time it will lose 50,000 or 60,000 yuan. The 2018 tiger ban has a great impact on Chen Yang, a circus that is deeply rooted in the county, and his order number has directly decreased by more than half.
What made Chen Yang finally abandon the circus was the re-severe situation of the epidemic situation in Dalian in July 2020. Throughout the first half of the year, the number of circus performances was zero, and the rebound of the epidemic made Chen Yang almost predict that there would be no harvest throughout the year. He dismissed eight actors, "disposed of monkeys and bears to the zoo," and sold the goats and puppies who were already able to perform to other circuses. When sending away the black bear who had been cooperating in the performance for ten years, Chen Yang also shed tears. But the two tigers could not be transported, had nowhere to go, and could only continue to be kept in the yards of the countryside. In 2020, the government had given a temporary subsidy of 750 yuan per month for 6 months of breeding expenses for Siberian tigers bred artificially in Suzhou, but it was still unable to afford the expenses of tigers. Chen Yang pondered that if anyone in the nearby village was willing to accept it, "think of a way to give it to them"—after all, there was no surviving circus in his village.
The once-popular star circus has also reached the stage of bitter support, Zhang Hongwei counted, and there were only seven or eight regular employees left in the group, less than one-tenth of the peak period. Willingly or not, most circus people have accepted the reality that the circus "is gone". Talking about this once proud tradition, they do not have the Ji Yu Xuan Ang of twenty years ago, nor the grievances they had when they issued the joint letter three years ago. Zhang Hongwei's expectations for the future have been reduced to the minimum, "even if the whole country cannot perform in the future, Wanqiao is the only circus town in the country and a national intangible cultural heritage." Can you keep a circus city or other venue here, and keep the former street art and the later high-end circus for inheritance? Good villains also let later people know that there was such a thing. ”
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