Résumé :
This chapter presents a historical overview of nonhuman animals (animals) in the nineteenth-century circus and travelling menagerie, and trained acts in the twentieth-century circus and cinema. The early modern circus began in the late eighteenth century around the time public menageries and zoos were emerging to influence scientific and social attitudes. Circus benefited from the way exotic animal display stimulated a growing nineteenth-century colonial business of hunting, capturing, transporting and trading wild animals to colonial centers; this ran parallel with campaigns to improve the welfare of domesticated animals. Exhibiting practices reached a monumental scale by the turn-of-the-twentieth-century with hundreds of thousands of animals as dead specimens in museums and live specimens in menageries and circus [→History of Animal Collections/AnimalTaxonomy]. By then, prominent hunters in parts of Africa and Asia were publicly warning of a worrying decline in species numbers in the wild where circus animals were obtained.