One by one the whole group was introduced to its new trainer. Not once was a gun fired. Not once was a cat struck, other than a sharp tap with that buggy whip. That season the “hopeless” act once more went on the road, and “Cap” Ricardo worked it!
In fact, “Cap” is a man of individual theories. Just as his kitchen chair was an idea of his own, so there are others.
“I’ll stick my head in any lion’s mouth on earth,” he says. “But,” with a wink, “I got a trick about it. Always chew tobacco, see? If the lion should happen to close down, I’d just let that tobacco go in his mouth. Ever notice how you’ll open your jaws sudden-like when you’ve got hold o’ something that tastes bad? Huh? Well, it’d be the same way with a lion. He’d turn loose and I’d take my head out.”
Which is an optimistic manner in which to look at things. The billing of “Cap” as “the man of a thousand scars” is only a slight exaggeration. He possesses them by the hundreds, for “Cap” is a specialist on undoing the misdeeds of others.
“It’s just this here old principle of red-hot coals, or coals of fire, or whatever you call ’em,” he explains. “Now, for instance, if you hit a man that’s tryin’ to be good to you, you’re goin’ to feel bad about it, ain’t you? Well, a cat, when he’s clawing you up—he knows what he’s doin’. Don’t ever get it in your head that he don’t. Particularly a tiger cat. I always did like tiger cats better’n I liked lion cats, at that. ’Course, lots of trainers will tell you different, but I’ve seen ’em all; I’ve been among the slums and I’ve been among the aristocrats, and what I claim is, the lions ain’t the king of beasts. But, be that as it may, a cat knows what he’s doing. And when he finds out he’s done a friend dirt, ain’t he goin’ to be sorry about it and do his best to make up? That’s my theory, and it works out too.”
Incidentally, one of these little coals of fire took shape one day while “Cap” was standing on the ballyhoo stand of a circus sideshow, a lion by his side. Inadvertently, he poked the lion in an eye, and the lion in turn bit off the middle finger of “Cap’s” right hand.
“But he didn’t mean to,” says “Cap”. “Figure yourself how surprised a guy gets when he bumps his face into a door in the dark. He never meant it.”
Which may sound as an unusual example. To a certain extent it is, for “Cap” and his theories have an outstanding place in the show world, the surprising thing about them being the fact that they have worked out to such an extent that he “breaks” a great many of the animal acts for the biggest circus in the world. However, there are other instances of affection between trainer and animal, almost as remarkable.
Out on a ranch in Colorado live a man and a woman who once were featured on the billboards of every city in the country. He was a menagerie superintendent, she a trainer of lions, tigers and elephants. But they troupe no more.
The circus does not represent to them what it once did. There seems a certain bitterness about it, a grimness which they are unable to dispel, and so they remain away. The elephant which they raised together from a three-year-old “punk” to one of the really great performers among pachyderms in America is dead, felled by volley after volley of steel-jacketed bullets during a rampage at Salina, Kansas, several years ago, in which he all but wrecked the menagerie and endangered the lives of hundreds of persons.