| Ursula cooling down her bears in the backyard of the San Diego Sports Arena. Most of the time, they were kept inside this large cage wagon (or maybe it was two cage wagons bolted together.) |
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Polar Bears #4
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3 comments:
This is one of the two big cage wagons that Ursula brought with her and her bears from Germany. They carried the bears and rode on one of the flat cars in the manner of cage wagons of old.
They were used for the last two of her 4 year road stint, the two stints on the Blue being separated by a two-year stay at the theme park near Haines City. The smaller transfer cages rode empty inside a tunnel car.
Now, for her first two years on the Blue the bears rode in their transfer cages inside the tunnel car. I have movies of them being rolled out. As I recall, these transfer cages were larger than the ones used for tigers and other cats. Bob MacDougall said that he decided to use the big cage wagons the last two years. He said they were much better for the purpose.
Not many big cage wagons have ridden out on the flats since they were put into use ca. 1970. I recall that a bear cage did so, also a wagon with farm animals. Then there was the Togni rhino and also those cat tiger cages with fold out exercise verandas.
Most cats I ever saw were on the Red in 1976. Gunther had all those tigers, plus all the leopards he was breaking for the next year and then were the lions of Holzmeir (sp?) or was it Noel’s animals?
Richard,
These big cage wagons were set on blocks and lined up to the permanent arena on the back lot. They called it an "arena", but it was only conducive to working with a few animals. It was originally built, I was told as an exercise cage for Ursula bears. It was hard to keep pedestals stable as it had a concrete floor which was sloped from the center, to allow water to drain when she washed the bears.
Charly's tigers were housed in these wagons when he retired, but we pushed cages up to another door for any practicing. It was too difficult to run them in in a straight line if you could not pass anything. GGW used some of the larger bear cages for some of his tigers for a while.
That arena was dismantled and was sitting on Venice beach with Pelicans in it at one time. Such a shame.
The first cat cage wagon RBBB built in 1992 was hauled on the flats. The tunnel car deal for cats was a terrible system of hauling.
Wade
The tunnel car was easier to use for Jewells lions than the double decker used for Charlies tigers. I would bang my head watering Charlies tigers but could stand up in the tunnel. We had Elvins cannon in the back.
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