WRose Flanders Bascom, born in Contoocook, Merrimack County, New Hampshire in 1880, was the first American woman lion tamer, who performed in the circus in the early 1900s.
WClyde Beatty was a famed animal trainer, zoo owner, and circus mogul. He joined Howe's Great London Circus in 1921 as a cage boy and spent the next four decades rising to fame as one of the most famous circus performers and animal trainers in the world. Through his career, the circus impresario owned several circuses, including his own Clyde Beatty Circus from 1945 to 1956.
WCaptain Suresh Biswas was a famous 19th-century adventurer from India.
WIrina Bugrimova was the first female lion tamer in the Soviet Union. Called a "circus legend" by sources such as the BBC, Bugrimova was the first woman in Russia and the then-Soviet Union to work with lions, tigers, and ligers in a variety of performing acts, and trained more than 70 big cats during her career.
WGunther Gebel-Williams was an animal trainer for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus from 1968-1990.
WCarl Hagenbeck was a German merchant of wild animals who supplied many European zoos, as well as P. T. Barnum. He created the modern zoo with animal enclosures without bars that were closer to their natural habitat. The transformation of the zoo architecture initiated by him is known as the Hagenbeck revolution. Hagenbeck founded Germany's most successful privately owned zoo, the Tierpark Hagenbeck, which moved to its present location in Hamburg's Stellingen district in 1907. He was also an ethnography showman and a pioneer in displaying humans next to animals in human zoos.
WClaire Heliot was a German lion tamer.
WMartin Lacey Jr. is an English circus performer and trainer of wild animals who has achieved fame in Germany. He is the son of Martin Lacey, the circus ringmaster and animal trainer who bred most of the tigers used in the Esso television advertisements in the 1970s.
WThomas Macarte was a one-armed lion tamer who as Massarti the Lion-Tamer was attacked and killed during a circus performance in Bolton in Lancashire.
WMartini Maccomo was a renowned lion tamer in Victorian Britain.
WMabel Stark, whose real name was Mary Ann Haynie, was a renowned tiger trainer of the 1920s. She was referred to as one of the world's first women tiger trainers/tamers. In its belated obituary, The New York Times lauded Stark as "one of the most celebrated animal trainers in a field dominated by men."
WIsaac A. Van Amburgh (1808–1865) was an American animal trainer who developed the first trained wild animal act in modern times. By introducing jungle acts into the circus, Van Amburgh paved the way for combining menageries with circuses. After that, menageries began using equestrian and clown performances in circus rings. Gradually the distinction between circus and menagerie faded.
WGeorge Wombwell,, was a famous menagerie exhibitor in Regency and early Victorian Britain. He founded Wombwell's Travelling Menagerie.