Therefore, the early training of a pachyderm is a delicate affair. First of all, the student is led to the “class-room” accompanied by an older and more experienced “bull.” Then, while the new applicant for performing honors watches, the older elephant is padded about the legs and tied; following which the blocks and tackles are pulled taut, causing the beast to lose its balance and fall on its side, the trainer meanwhile repeating and re-repeating the “lay-down” command. At the end of which the performer is allowed to rise and is given a carrot. Time after time is this done, while the student watches—especially that part where the feeding comes in. It all has its purpose—to attempt to fix in the new performer’s mind the fact that, in the first place, this schooling won’t hurt, and secondly that all a “bull” has to do to earn a nice, fresh carrot is to have a couple of ropes hooked to his legs and be pulled over on his side. So quick is the intelligence of some elephants that instances have been known of the beasts learning their primary lesson on the first attempt. Others, hampered by fear, have required a month.
In the same way is every other rudimentary trick taught. The elephant is shown how to stand on his head by having his trunk pulled under him and his hind legs raised. After which he receives carrots. The reverse system is used for teaching him “the hind-leg stand”—and again the carrots appear. After this, the block and tackle is not a necessity except as a means of support, while hitherto unused muscles are strengthened. The animal has learned his alphabet; now it is simply a matter of putting the letters together, the words themselves being furnished largely by his own antics.
Incidentally, this new order of things in the training field has led to a different relationship between the man and the beast. There was a time when animals were only animals, to be taken from their cages, pushed through their tricks, then shunted back into their cages and forgotten. Things are different now. The average menagerie has become more of an animal hotel, with conveniences. The superintendent must be a person who has studied not only the beasts themselves, but their anatomy, in other words, a jungle veterinarian.
The boss of the circus menagerie of to-day doesn’t merely content himself with seeing that his charges are well fed. By a glance at the coat of a lion or tiger he can tell whether that beast has indigestion; ventilation is watched carefully to dispel the ammonia smell of the cat animals and thereby prevent headaches on the part of the beasts; teeth are pulled, ingrown toenails doctored, operations performed, and every disease from rickets to pneumonia treated and cured. And the fact that man at last has learned that beasts possess temperaments, individuality, emotions and a good many things that humans brag about has seemed to place them on a different plane. Where there once was cruelty there now is often affection, both on the part of the trainer, and also on that of the animal!
In the Al G. Barnes Circus, in California, for instance, is a great, sleek-muscled, four hundred-pound tiger, that is ever watching, watching, his eyes constantly on the crowds about his den, seeking but one person. At the sight of any blond-haired woman, he rises excitedly, hurries close to the bars, growling in gruff, yet pleased fashion. Then, with a second look, he turns and slumps to the floor again. It is not the person he seeks!
That tiger is a killer. He has murdered four other cat animals, two lions and two tigers, yet if the woman he awaits should appear, she could tie a cord string about his neck and lead him around the tent in perfect safety.
He is one of the few wrestling tigers in captivity. Twice a day for two years, in the steel arena, his claws unguarded, his great jaws unmuzzled, this four hundred-pound Bengal wrestled in almost human fashion with Mabel Stark, the woman who had raised him from cubhood, and whom he loved with a genuine affection. Once, in a motion picture, when it was necessary for the “double” of the heroine to appear as though she were almost killed by a tiger, Mabel Stark took the job. The tiger leaped and knocked her down. Then, while the cameras ground, he seemingly crushed her skull in his giant jaws. Yet those who watched saw that those jaws were closed so carefully, in spite of the swiftness of their action, that they barely dishevelled the trainer’s hair.
There came the time when Mabel Stark was called away to become one of the featured trainers for the combined Ringling Brothers-Barnum and Bailey Circus, the biggest circus of them all. Mabel Stark is far better known to-day than she was back in the days with Al G. Barnes. But with the circus she left behind, that tiger still watches, still waits and seeks constantly for one woman out of the crowds which daily throng through the menagerie, rising with hope, then dropping forlornly again to the floor, while, in the midst of her greater fame, Mabel Stark smiles and sighs, and talks of how wonderful it would be if she could only have her wrestling tiger!
It’s only one instance of hundreds. Up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, at the winter quarters of the Barnum show, lives Captain “Dutch” Ricardo, “the man of a thousand scars.” There was a time when they called “Cap” the biggest fool in the animal business—for “Cap” was one of the pioneers of the newer methods of animal training. It was he, for instance, who once walked into the office of H. H. Tammen, then owner of the Sells-Floto Circus, and made him a proposition.
“I understand,” he said, “that you’ve got a bunch of bad cats. Been beaten, ain’t they?”