Mabel Stark
Known as the First woman tiger trainer/tamer, and one of the most famous trainers remembered today is Mabel Stark. Orphaned at seventeen year of age, Mabel first failed in the field of nursing before joining the circus as a background dancer. She began working with one of the animal trainers in her free time and eventually marries Louis Roth, another big cat trainer, for a short time. Louis was one of the first trainers to use positive reinforcement while training the cats and is a training technique that Mabel used in her career. Only a few years after she began training, she had her first year in the big show and quickly became the star. Mabel continued to push the boundaries of animal training and improve her act and defying the norms of what was expected of a woman saying,
“Because I was a woman and grew tired of hearing men trainers say that a woman could not do this or that, I broke a twelve tiger act sixteen years ago and began wrestling tigers eight years ago. And now I’m going to have my twenty tiger act – the biggest tiger act in the business!”
-Mabel Stark (Women of the American Circus 164)