#susannance

I have been thinking a lot for a few years about how animals function as celebrities and do so differently than human celebrities. Animals don't know they are famous and they have no conception of the network of media, publicists and fans that makes celebrity possible. Yet many people are certain that some celebrity animals know and love their fans nonetheless.

Pictured here is a Professional Bull Riders bucking bull known as Charlie Bullware. He has a Facebook page through which his handlers communicate with fans and rodeo participants, and do so in the supposed voice of Charlie. Everyone involved in this knows that Charlie is just a bull, but still they all engage in the theatre of bull-fan interaction. Why so?

To try to figure this mystery out, I came up with a theory of animal celebrity, and wrote about it in a chapter called "A Star is Born to Buck: Animal Celebrity and the Marketing of Professional Rodeo." It appears in a great new collection edited by Michelle Gilbert and James Gillett called Sport, Animals and Society, published this year by Routledge.

This is a ponderous image. It is a polaroid taken by an unidentified photographer watching animal training at the Hamid-Morton Circus in the 1960s or 70s (which we can guess from the chimp's outfit?). Both of these animals are just kids, juveniles who were easier to train because less likely to assert their independence. Is this image sad or cute?

Recently I wrote a review of three films that work through animal captivity in circuses and private homes, and the mixed feelings people sometimes have when they realize that they may have bitten off more than they can chew in keeping wild animals as pets and co-workers. I called the piece "On Wild Animals, Hubris and Redemption" and it appeared in the October 2012 issue of the academic journal Society & Animals. 

visit the review at academia.edu

visit this polaroid at the New York Public Library

This is the horse Highball, pictured in Chicago in 1904. In the nineteenth century many people spoke and wrote about racehorses as knowing competitors who relished the competition and sought to flatter their owners and bettors by winning.

So, who cropped this photo and when? That information is lost to history, but I think we can see here a visual representation of human work to imagine horses as modern individuals with ambition, fortitude and—somehow—knowledge of the human cultures that invented horse racing.

This image appears in my recent article, "Game Stallions and other 'Horseface Minstrelsies' of the American Turf," which appeared in the October 2013 issue of Theatre Journal.

visit the article at academia.edu