Loneliness on the part of the elephant for his old trainers is commonly accredited for his “badness.” But the circus had no other recourse; there were human lives to guard and only one thing was possible, to slay the maddened beast before it, in turn, became a slayer. But that argument doesn’t go with his former trainers.
“They surely could have found some way of holding him quiet until we got there,” is their plaint, “they just didn’t understand him! If they had even told him that we were coming, he’d have quieted down. He just wanted us, and we weren’t there, and he went out of his head for a while. If they’d only penned him up in the cars and then wired us, we’d have come; we’d have gotten there somehow!”
In answer to which the circus points to pictures of wrecked wagons, smashed ticket boxes, torn side walling, and overturned animal dens—in vain. The trainers can’t accept the argument.
“The circus wouldn’t be the same—without Snyder,” is their reply, and the big tops go traveling on without two stellar performers.
A similar incident came in Texas, during the necessary killing of another elephant on the same show, which had become maddened through “must,” and was virtually insane. He had torn the menagerie almost to shreds, injured one man, and was holding a whole town at bay. And while circus men hastened for army rifles, the executive staff struggled with a woman who strove by every means of feminine aggressiveness to break from their grasp, and go to that elephant.
“Let me go, you idiots!” she screamed in hysterical fashion. “I can handle him! I’m not afraid—let me go! Let me go!”
She had trained the elephant for two years, and it had obeyed her every command. With any other pachyderm, she would have understood that the natural condition of “must” brings insanity, and that, when in this condition, it recognizes no one, understands no command, and knows nothing save the wildest sort of maniacal antagonism toward everything, animate or inanimate, which may come into its path. But her faith in this particular beast had transgressed even beyond good sense. It was necessary to drag her from the circus grounds by main force before the first shot could be fired at the unfortunate beast!
Nor does the love of animals always confine itself to the trainer. Workmen of the circus are shadowy beings; few persons know whence they come, what their life before they drifted into the nomadic, grim life of the “razorback,” the “canvasman” or the “big top roughneck.” There are stories by the scores in the unshaven beings who sleep about the lot in the afternoons; stories of men whose finer cast of features tells of a time when all was not work and long hours, hints of hidden things in the shadows; they are men who seldom write a letter or receive one. And they are lonely.
Human companionship often does not appeal to them. But the friendship of animals is a different thing. Perhaps it is because they can talk to these beasts during the long hours of the night, as the circus train rocks along on its journey from town to town, knowing that their confidences will not be revealed. Nevertheless, the fact remains that more than one workman has been left behind in an alien burial ground, with no close human friend to know of his death, and with only a lion or tiger or elephant to watch for a companion who never again appears.
More than once also I have seen laborers of the circus volunteer to “sit up” with a dying orang-outang or chimpanzee, doing their work by day, remaining awake at night and nursing the beast in the hours of darkness; at last, lonely again, tears in their eyes, to shuffle on out to their hard, grim, dangerous labors, while a still form remains behind, to be buried behind the big top, after the matinée. It was such a case as this that formed a story which a certain circus owner likes to tell, as he explains one of the reasons why the workmen of his show are better treated than they were in other days, and furnished with more conveniences and accommodations. For in this case it was the man and not the animal that suffered tragedy.