“Wilbert! Wilbert!” his wife yelled at the top of her lungs toward the makeshift house behind the llama cage at Behn’s Game Farm in the tiny town of Aniwa, in northern Wisconsin. “He’s hard of hearing,” she explained. With a slight limp, Wilbert slowly emerged from the plywood building, looking as though he’d just awakened from a nap.
At eighty years old and some change, Wilbert Behn is the oldest lion and tiger tamer in the world. His white hair is frazzled, perhaps from his snooze, and his ratty jeans and soiled shirt carry a ripe smell that suggests he knows animals. As he walked by the tiger cage, the fierce Bengali and Siberian cats watched him nervously. Obviously, they know who’s the boss.
How does one become a lion tamer? “One day I just jumped in the ring and tried it out,” Wilbert remembered. “I’ve been doing shows ever since, for the last forty-nine years. You should try it—you never know if you’re a natural until you get in the cage,” he told me. I couldn’t tell if he was joking. I did not point out that if I find out I’m not a natural, I’ll be dead.
I asked the missus what they usually feed these big cats, who seemed to be eyeing me hungrily. “Oh, fresh meat. Usually beef or veal. We don’t get as many horses anymore because people sell them for dog food.” Wilbert said that feeding time can be dangerous, though. “Once when I was feeding the lion, I got bit through both of my legs, and I got clobbered. I stepped over the trough and he just figured I was meat. I was real hung up for a while, until someone came to help me. If it wasn’t for rubber boots, I wouldn’t be around anymore.”
Nevertheless, Wilbert retains his cool composure around the cats. “I always look them in the eye. If you don’t, that’s when they get you. I use two objects, since the cats can’t concentrate on two things at a time. You know if I really didn’t want to get hurt by the cats, though, the only thing I could really do would be to stay the heck out of the ring.”
The danger isn’t only to the tamer, however. “I’ve had up to six cats in the ring at the same time, and once I did a show and the lioness went after the tiger. She bit the tiger right through the shoulder blade and blood was everywhere. I finally was able to get them separated by distracting them, so they didn’t kill each other. I looked into the stands and noticed that the audience had run away.”
“See, most cats are declawed to make them less dangerous, but I never declaw or neuter them. If they’re neutered or declawed, I wouldn’t even have them on a plate—they’re still dangerous. A woman just got maimed down in Busch Gardens, Florida. A cat got her and chewed off her arm at the elbow.”
Wilbert seems to love the danger of training lions and tigers, however, and he lifted up his shirt to show me scars from tiger bites across his body. But many tamers aren’t even that lucky. Wilbert told the gruesome story of his friend Dwayne who started another circus in northern Wisconsin. “The first show he did, a cat got a hold of him. The lion dragged him around the ring in front of two hundred schoolkids and their parents. He was dead by then, though.” Wilbert shakes his head sadly. “Now, every time I do a show, I can still see him standing there in the ring with me.”
Wilbert viewed this incident as a reason to continue with his work. He pointed out his plywood auditorium with the large sign above the door that says, “NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR INJURIES.” Ever the showman, Wilbert said, “If you want, I could bring the cats into the ring and give you a show now!”—Eric Dregni
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