From Richard Reynolds

Several recent commentators asked about trained clouded leopards. The photo above shows the only one I have ever heard of performing in a circus ring. The trainer is the late Chuck Lizza who worked with Ron and Joy Holiday in their “Cat Dancers” act. Ron (Ron Guay) and Joy (Doris Gagnon) were ballet dancers who became circus animal trainers, presenting big cats uncaged in the ring. Both Lizza and Joy were tragically killed in the fall of 1998 by a big tiger. That spelled the end of Cat Dancers. [I always thought it dangerous to have a 300+ pound tiger on a leash with only Ron or Joy to keep it from tearing away, leaping out of the ring and into the audience, which was right at the ring curb in the one-ring formats where I saw them work.] The Holidays’ clouded leopard was a very gentle animal and they used him in their presentation for several years in the 1990s. Clouded leopards are much smaller than the other big cats and just barely make it into that category. For the most part they seem very gentle with human handlers, a far cry from the savage behavior the males often show toward the females during breeding. The males are known to kill or badly injure their mates. Hence captive reproduction has been a problem. Part of it seems to be the environment where they are introduced. In the wild they are mostly nocturnal and live in dense jungles of Southeast Asia, making field studies nearly impossible. We probably know less about the habits and behavior of clouded leopards than any of the other big cats. As Jim Alexander noted, the San Diego zoo uses (or did use) clouded leopards in its performing animal acts. Real crowd pleasers, they were presented on stage on the leash and demonstrated their incredible leaping ability. Other than these and the Holiday animal I have never heard of a clouded leopard in a ring. I have uncovered a few references to them with circuses, perhaps as menagerie animals. A squib in an early 1920s Billboard stated that Al G, Barnes had recently acquired one in a shipment of Far Eastern animals. Then in advance of the John Robinson Circus date in Ashtabula, OH on May 27, 1924, the Star Beacon ran a photo of animal trainer John “Chubby” Guilfoyle with a clouded leopard on a leash. The caption read, “Guilfoyle has been nurse and trainer to this leopard since this cub days.” I do not know whether he used the c. leopard in his act or if it was only a menagerie animal. It would certainly have been easy to bring into the ring. Alfred Court once had a clouded leopard according to what was told me by his nephew, the late Wilson Storey. It never appeared in the ring, however. I do not know just when this was but have the impression it was while Court was in the USA from 1940 to 1945. I have never seen a reference to its traveling with RBBB. RBBB’s descriptions of Court’s acts also mention ocelots, but , again, I have seen no evidence that these small cats ever appeared in the Court acts - -certainly they do not appear in any of the hundreds of photos I have seen of them. Moreover, the lists of Court animals in official RBBB files do not mention ocelots. There has never been a clouded leopard on RBBB as far as I can ascertain. Richard Reynolds