Acrobatic performances are given by sea animals at the Central Zoo on a daily basis. Amid the playing of cheerful music animals acquit themselves well in accordance with the gestures of a trainer, holding the audience spellbound.

The trainer is Kim Ryon Hui who has turned 60. She has trained fur-seals and seals to perform stunts.

In 1981 she began to work at the Central Zoo after finishing her middle school course. There was an occasion that made her get interested in sea animal training.

It happened in September 2009 when she was working as a seal keeper. Fishermen of a fishery station in the East Sea of Korea caught a fur-seal in the waters off Thongchon and took it to the Central Zoo.

According to them, sea animals such as fur-seal and seal are naturally ferocious and unfriendly to humans but the fur-seal strangely kept following their fishing boat from a deep sea and, even after it was put out of the water, it was at the heels of crew on the deck.

Ryon Hui was kept in charge of the fur-seal as well. As she had a better understanding of the nature and habit of the clever fur-seal which tends to be intimate with humans, she thought of training it to perform a stunt.

An online education course she was enrolled in was so much helpful to her. But there was still a long way to go for her to succeed in her goal of training sea animals.

When she tried to teach a movement to the fur-seal, the latter often wounded her hand all of a sudden before running away into the water.

She was wounded many times but did not give up. She struggled with the sea animals all day long in cold water until she was exhausted.

It was one thing to win the trust of the fur-seal, but quite another to make it understand her intention and follow it.

She loved the fur-seal and took great care of it before asking it to obey her order.

In this way she began to communicate with it and trained other fur-seals and seals one after another. Finally she succeeded in animals’ acrobatic performance.

Over the past decades she has had several seals breed and helped fur-seals and seals acclimatize to fresh water, playing her part in protecting and breeding animal resources. In addition, she has created over 40 animal stunts to the delight of people.

She is honoured to become a meritorious person of socialist patriotism and lives in a new flat in Pothong Riverside Terraced Houses District, a luxury residential quarter built at state expense for persons of merit.

“People gave me another name such as ‘fur-seal grandma’, and I love it,” said Kim Ryon Hui. “I take pleasure in seeing visitors having a good time with sea animal stunts.”

She is still devoting herself to the creation of new pieces.

Yon Ok