Animal Trainer Mabel Stark

Photo Credit: Three Lions
Date: 09 Jan 1938

Mabel Stark (09 Dec 1889 – 20 Apr 1968), whose real name was Mary Haynie, was a renowned tiger trainer of the 1920s, and she was referred to as the world's first woman tiger trainer/tamer. She joined the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1922, where she performed in Madison Square Garden with snarling tigers and a black panther. By the end of that season, of the six wild animal acts featured with the circus, Mabel Stark's was clearly the greatest success. In 1923, she starred in the Ringling Bros. center ring, but two years later in 1925, the circus banned all wild animal acts. After a sojourn to Europe where she performed in a circus, she came back to the U.S. in 1928 and began work with the John Robinson Show. In Bangor, Maine, she lost her footing in a muddy arena and was seriously mauled by her tigers. She would suffer a wound that almost severed her leg, face lacerations, a hole in her shoulder, a torn deltoid muscle and a host of other injuries. She was rescued by fellow trainer, Terrell Jacobs, and returned to the ring in a matter of weeks, swathed in bandages and walking with a cane. She suffered numerous maulings and serious injury over her nearly 60 years of working with tigers. At one point in her career, she would face 18 big cats in the ring.

She performed with the Sells-Floto Circus in 1929 and then rejoined the company she started out with back in 1911, the Al G. Barnes Circus, after it had been sold to Ringling Bros. in 1930, and stayed there until it folded in 1935. She toured with some small circuses and lived in Japan where she performed her circus act in the 1950s. She returned to California and finished her career at the Jungle Compound (later called Jungleland) at Thousand Oaks. Stark appeared occasionally on television in the 1960s. For example, she did a stint as one of the guests with an unusual occupation on What's My Line?, the popular Sunday Night CBS-TV program. In 1968 Jungleland was sold to a new owner who disliked Stark and fired her. Soon after she left, one of her tigers escaped and was shot. Stark was angry and hurt about the animal's destruction and felt that she could have safely secured the tiger if the owners had asked for her assistance. Three months later, on April 20, 1968, she died from an overdose of barbiturates. In the last pages of her autobiography, Hold That Tiger, Stark writes: "The chute door opens as I crack my whip and shout, 'Let them come.' Out slink the striped cats, snarling and roaring, leaping at each other or at me. It's a matchless thrill, and life without it is not worthwhile to me."

Source: Conejo Valley Historical Society