Likewise the pig which you’ve seen squealing in the wake of the clown in the circus. The secret? Simply that His Hoglets has been taken from his mother at birth and raised on a bottle. His feeding has been timed so that it comes during circus hours. The pig follows the clown because he knows he’s going to get a square meal. At certain places in the circuit of the big top the clown pauses and gives him a few nips from the bottle. Then he goes on again and the pig runs squealing after. Simple, isn’t it?
In the same manner is the “follow goose” trained. The person he trails has food, and the goose knows he’s going to get it. Likewise the pigs which you’ve seen “shooting the chutes.”
A pig isn’t supposed to have much intelligence. Perhaps he hasn’t—but you can have a trained-pig act all your own very easily.
Simply build a pen leading to a set of stairs which lead in turn to a chute, the chute traveling down into another closely netted enclosure. In this enclosure put a bucket of favorite pig food. Then turn the hogs loose and let then make their own deductions.
First of all, the pigs will try to reach the food by going through the netting. That’s impossible. So at last they turn to the runway, go up the steps, hesitate a long while, then finally slide down the chute and get what they’re after. Then—here’s the strange part of it: after a week or so, remove the food. The pigs will keep on shooting the chutes just the same. By some strange form of animal reasoning, the pleasure of food has become associated with that exercise of sliding down that incline. Like a dog that gains a form of stomachic satisfaction from the sight of food, so do the pigs derive a certain amount of pleasure from going where the food ought to be! And they’ll shoot the chutes for you as often as you please. Particularly if you feed them directly after it’s done!
In fact, the system of rewards and payment for work holds true through every form of trained animal life. 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. Even lions, tigers and leopards have their likes, but with them the payment comes in a different fashion.
Jungle cats are primeval in their instincts. They’re unable to control themselves at the sight of food, and a few strips of meat distributed in the training den might lead to a fight. Therefore the new style of trainer has a different method. He talks to the cats!
Nor is that so difficult as it sounds. A short association with animals and one easily can learn the particular intonation by which they express pleasure. With the lion, this takes form in a long drawn-out meow of satisfaction; with the leopard and the tiger it is evinced by purring, as with house cats. The trainer simply practices an imitation of these sounds until he masters them, with the result that he is almost invariably answered by the beast when he emits them! The animal seems to understand that the trainer is seeking to convey the fact that he is pleased, and the beast appears pleased also. As to the reward extraordinary, there is the joy of joys—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. A catnip ball and the world immediately becomes rosy; the great cats roll in it, toss it about their cages, purr and arch their backs, all in a perfect frenzy of delight. Therefore, when they do their work, they get their catnip. When they don’t work they’re simply docked their week’s wages; that’s all.
Old principles, naturally, and perhaps all the more efficacious for their age. In fact, there is one circus in the West which regularly depends upon this age-worn idea of food to save itself in wet weather. It possesses one of the largest and strongest elephants existent in the United States, an animal capable of pulling any of the show’s wagons from hub-deep mud with but little effort. There is only one trouble. When Nature made that elephant, it put concrete where the brains should be. Training is next to impossible. The elephant simply doesn’t seem able to assimilate a command. Which worries the circus not at all.