Circus Time: Shiken Circus Animals

Shiken didn't just do an assortment of some of the cutest circus ponies ever, they also made some circus animals, too! And at least one of them is a Hagen Renaker imitation.

Look familiar? 

He is a lot bigger than the Hagen Renaker Begging Dog, but other than that, they are very, very similar.

He has a Shiken Bone China sticker and since he is made of bone china, he is whiter than the Hagen Renaker dog.

He also has a stamp underneath - it looks like the letter R inside a circle to me. I'm not sure how that relates to Shiken; maybe it indicates who painted it?

Shiken made pedestals to go with their performing animals. I don't know if the green one was intended for the dog or not, but they did come together when I bought them from another collector.

There is also a circus monkey by Shiken. Truth be told, I dislike monkeys, and I only keep this one because it is circus related and the only one like it that I have ever seen.

This one also came with a Shiken pedestal in blue with a big yellow spot.

 A Shiken sticker is on the back of the monkey

and it has the same stamp on the base that the dog has.

The final piece in the trio is a seal who is standing on its back flippers while balancing a ball on its (nonexistent) nose.

It came with a black pedestal that has a big white spot, although when I took these pictures I put the seal on the green one by mistake.

There is a Shiken sticker on the seal's side and the stamp underneath.

Hagen Renaker made a circus seal mama and baby set in the 1950s. Ball colors varied per piece and came in gold, red, yellow, and blue. (Photo from Google Images and attributed to hagenrenakerhorses.com.)

I haven't seen any blatant copies of the seals, but I have come across two different sets of performing seals that may have been influenced by the Hagen Renaker pieces.

This group of three seals has no stickers or maker's marks on them. Since their balls are painted in a different color scheme than the Shiken seal's ball, I don't think they are by Shiken.

Although this one has a nonexistent nose like the Shiken seal's!

I think they are really cute but see no clue as to the manufacturer. 

Are they, like the Shiken pieces, copies or even an example of another company taking Hagen Renaker's idea and running with it?

A set is currently on Etsy and has a sticker, but that's a souvenir sticker from Sea World, not a manufacturer's sticker.

Copies or the real deal, they're all fun to play with and set up scenes for photo showing.

I plan to continue to research the Shiken company. A Google search will bring up a lot of Shiken china animals, many in groups of three, but I cannot find any information about the company that made all these delightful pieces. (Please contact me at horsiemama8@gmail.com if you can share any information with me - I'd appreciate it.)

Coming next? The absolute teeniest, tiniest circus horse in my collection.

Prepare to be amazed!

Mourning a Student

(This is a non horsey post.)

Teaching is a wonderful profession - you get an opportunity to touch lives and make a difference every day. It can also be challenging and difficult, but I loved being a teacher and cherished those years I spent with kiddos.

A teacher's heart can be broken, though, and mine was broken yesterday when I saw this news article. 

The crash happened near the elementary school where I had taught, and so I knew there was a good chance that the teens who were killed were kids that I knew or had had in my classroom.

I was right.

Last spring I was asked to come out of retirement and take over SOAR, a classroom for teens who had been expelled from school. The class was for kids that were working to be able to return to school the following August. One of the students, KR, was familiar to me as he had attended the elementary school where I had taught. 

It was the most difficult teaching position I'd ever had and I went home in tears more than once. But we had our successes, too, one of them the day that KR presented me with a drawing of a seal he had made me and then asked to hang on the wall beside my desk where we could all enjoy it.

In this post, he is the boy in the photo with headphones. (That's my friend and fellow teacher, Kathy Nimmer and Nacho. She had agreed to come visit my class and talk to them about guide dogs. KR and the other kids were fascinated!)

On the last day of school I wrote that I had gotten ten of the original thirteen students through the program and that I hoped they would find success in the coming school year. KR was one of those students and he did indeed return to his school last August. And now he is gone. Way too soon.

I am absolutely heartsick.

(Two other blog posts about the class can be found here and here.)