The word itself awakes emotions. Here in Sweden there is a law that forbids showing wild cats on a circus. But the law does not include domestic cats, therefore it happens now and then that they are shown on a circus. Those who then are showed often comes from a former state of the USSR. The newspaper "Norra Västerbotten" made a story where you can see a woman holding a titbit and a cat in profile that is reaching for it. The article said nothing about the breed or origin of the cat. With a camera and videocamera I took the car and drove to the circusarea. After a few minutes of searching I found her caravan. They had just had a performance for a group of daycare kids. On my question if the cats were from Siberia (considering the large round head with the small ears, the short profile and the big chest) she answered "only two". Only two of
the cats were Siberian cats. She had more cats, but it was these two Siberian cats that drew the attention and who were shown to the journalists and other interested people. She told us that she picked them up in the siberian town Perm. She gladly showed these two cats to us and demonstrated some of the tricks she shows at the performances. The tricks were all based on the natural good sense of balanse that the cat has and their love to play. I noticed how she continously and with great skill rewarded the cats for their tricks with small titbits from a pocket in her suit, it turned out that they were small pieces of lever. Her perfomance clearly left the audience with new impressions and delight, perhaps especially for the youngest ones. The cat is the most popular domestic animal in Sweden, not the dog as many believe. You could tell especially when her
performance with the cats got significantly more enthusiastic applause than the numbers with poodles. Perhaps there will be more performances similar to these, now that the connections to the east are more open. The first time I came in contact to the conception "circuscats" was two and a half year ago, when me and my friend Vera bought our siberian cats in Russia. On the train, with all the cats in plaited cages, scattered around in the overcrowded cabin, Vera asked if I knew
what our copassengers were talking about. No, I said. Then she said: -They think we are a travelling catcirkus. Then, afterwards I have thought that in a way it was a sort of "catcirkus" when we were carrying around our catcages amd going through our hardships on the journey from Sweden to Russia
and back again.