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The chapters on animals in Under the Big Top led directly to Mr. Cooper’s Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything, which is the menagerie inside out. In the course of long study of caged and captive jungle creatures, and aided by the continuous study of his staff-helpers, Mr. Cooper has found no human emotion which these animals do not exhibit at some time or other in appropriate circumstances. “I have seen jealousy, insanity, hallucination, the highest kind of love including mother love, the fiercest brand of hate, trickery, cunning and revenge. I have seen gratitude. The only desire I will exclude as not being common to humans and animals is the desire for money. There is a corresponding animal desire, however. It is horse meat. Horse meat is the currency of the animal kingdom.”[83]
The extraordinary instance of Casey, a giant, black-faced chimpanzee[84] captured in infancy in the Cape Lopez district of Africa, has suggested to Mr. Cooper that something most remarkably approaching a man could be bred from a monkey in as few as four generations. Not a physical likeness, but mental, is the prospect. Enough apes of Casey’s type would be necessary to avoid inbreeding, and the first generation born in captivity would have to be subjected to wholly human contacts.[85] About 150 years would be required for the experiment.
But Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything is a book of fact, not of theories. It is most valuable, perhaps, in its contrast between the old and new methods of animal training. Mr. Cooper shows in the first chapter the transformation that has come about:
“The circus animal trainer of today is not chosen for his brutality, or his cunning, or his so-called bravery. He is hired because he has studied and knows animals—even to talking their various ‘languages.’ There are few real animal trainers who cannot gain an answer from their charges, talking to them as the ordinary person talks to a dog and receiving as intelligent attention. Animal men have learned that the brute isn’t any different from the human; the surest way to make him work is to pay him for his trouble. In the steel arena today ... the animals are just so many hired hands. When they do their work, they get their pay.... The present-day trainer doesn’t cow the animal or make it afraid of him.... The first thing to be eliminated is not fear on the part of the trainer, but on the part of the animal!... Sugar for dogs, carrots for elephants, fish for seals, stale bread for the polar bears, a bit of honey or candy for the ordinary species of bear, pieces of apple or lumps of sugar for horses; every animal has his reward for which he’ll work a hundred times harder than ever he did in the old and almost obsolete days of fear.” With lions, tigers and leopards the trainer, imitating their own sound that expresses satisfaction, can convey to them his satisfaction with their work. And there is catnip. “To a house cat, catnip is a thing of ecstasy. To a jungle cat it holds as much allurement as morphine to a dope user, or whisky to a drunkard. The great cats roll in it, toss it about their cages, purr and arch their backs, all in a perfect frenzy of delight.”
Does this new method of animal training seem to remove from the circus menagerie most of its adventure and romance? Does Mr. Cooper’s account of the “Wallace act,” in which a lion impersonates an untameable lion and fights its trainer, seem to sickle over all such performances a hopeless theatricalism? The answer may be found in the pages of Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything, a chronicle of breathlessness if ever there was one. Here are stories of Mabel Stark, Captain Ricardo, Bob McPherson and many others to make the hair curl: stories of animals that remembered and men that forgot, of trained dogs and untrained leopards, of animal nature and—best of all—of human nature. How much better, this book, than the fiction which attempts to approach animals from the imaginative side! With a low bow in the direction of Mr. Kipling, it may be pointed out that the ordinary child’s sole contact with the beasts of the jungle is through the circus menagerie or the zoo. As captive animals are utterly different from wild, it is in terms of the captive existence that the child reasonably craves to know and appreciate them (I say “child,” but in this matter we are all children, regardless of age). But no one who reads Lions ’n’ Tigers ’n’ Everything will ever see an animal act again without an observation at least twice as intelligent or an interest at least doubly great.