“Bring me a piece of canvas,” he ordered, and an animal man hurried to comply. The owner placed the fabric on the end of a stick and pushed it to the very bars of the cage. The beast growled, hissed, then leaped again. But the claws struck the steel of the bars and fully two feet above the offending canvas! The owner grunted.
“Hallucinations!” he announced. “Sees everything about twice as big as it really is. That’s why it strikes so high.”
Following which test after test was resorted to, with the same result and the same verdict. Rest and darkness, pampering and quiet did not aid, though the circus man strove for months to return the tiger to its natural self. At last came the only remedy for a suffering thing,—a shot from a high-powered rifle, and the entry of a menagerie loss in the cause of humanity.
The same sort of action was necessary a few years ago in another circus when one of a group of four tigers suddenly developed fits while the show was on parade. But before Fred Alispaw, the menagerie superintendent, could perform an act of mercy, the companion tigers had given an example of cruelty toward one of their kind. The unusual actions of the Bengal seemed to madden them; before the shot could be fired, they had nearly torn their cage-mate to bits! When the hide of the beast was examined, it did not show a space larger than a six-inch square that had not been pierced by the claws of the other fright-maddened occupants of the cage.
Fear—fear of man, of unusual happenings, even of a flag which drops awry and flaps against the bars of a cage—is the biggest problem that the animal trainer has to face. The minute an animal becomes possessed of fear, he becomes possessed also of murder, nor is his best friend, man or beast, exempt from the effects of the desire to kill the first thing he sees. Mabel Stark, one of the widely known animal trainers, bears many a tiger scar simply because a “towner” horseman insisted on riding too close to the cage which she occupied with three tigers during a parade. The animals became frightened; they fought first among themselves, then turned almost simultaneously upon their trainer. When at last she was rescued, she was a mass of claw and tooth marks—and a hospital inmate for more than three weeks!
Greed and avarice too are always present. The exemplification of greed is especially apparent at a time when one would think it farthest away, at the time of mating. When the springtime comes and the birds twitter in the trees, when the young man walks up the maple-lined street with a box of candy under his arm, and when the unselfishness of love is in the air, that is when the cat animal of the menagerie becomes greedy. The lion or the tiger doesn’t woo his wife by offering her the best of the portion of horse-meat that is shoved to him through the bars. Instead, he eats his supply as rapidly as he can, then rushes toward his mate, gives her a good wallop on the side of the head, and takes her breakfast away from her. Or if the mate happens to be a bit stronger than he, she does the robbing. It’s all a matter of strength and determination, and the result usually is a glorious marital fight.
Incidentally greed, in one or two instances of menagerie life, has brought strange denouements. In one case, at least, it made a hero out of a coward, and reversed the regular rules of menagerie supremacy.
Although the lion may be the king of beasts in looks, actions, and honor, he is far from it in fighting ability. The clash between the lion and the tiger invariably ends in a victory for the striped beast, and in several encounters between King Edward, a big black-maned Nubian, and Dan, a Royal Bengal tiger, the “king of beasts” had moved out second best. Evidently Dan realized the fact, for when the two were in the arena together, it was a constant succession of bullying on the part of the tiger, of cuffing matches in which the striped beast stood on his haunches and slapped the lion with quick, shifting blows, for all the world like those of a lightweight boxer, and of rumbling growls which sent King Edward hurrying to his pedestal whenever he came in the proximity of his enemy. But at last there came a reversal.
They were cage-mates, that is, they occupied a cage together, but not in company, if it thus can be explained. A two-inch wooden partition divided them, and while each had half a cage, neither ever was actually placed with the other. For several days King Edward had been “off his feed,” and to tempt his appetite, Lucia Zora, his trainer, conceived the idea of feeding him a live chicken. The fowl was thrust between the bars to squawk and flutter wildly, and at last to be captured in the big claws of the excited lion, which, like some overgrown house cat, began to toy with the tid-bit for a moment before devouring it. But just then, a new element entered, Dan the Bengal.
The tiger had scented the fowl and noticed the commotion on the other side of the cage. Frantically he had begun to work at the partition which divided him from the lion; finally in some fashion, he loosened the clamp, and then raised the dividing board, even as a person would raise a window, and rushed through toward the tormented King Edward. But this time the lion did not skulk away. Instead, the beast turned, a raging engine of destruction, and the fight that followed was the fiercest thing that the menagerie had seen in years. The animal men sought to separate them. It was useless. King Edward had reached the end of his submission, and Dan, through his greed, the end of his life. For the lion, disregarding all the usual leonine methods of fighting, suddenly adopted the tiger’s tactics, attacking from a position straight on his haunches, and with both forepaws working, instead of the usual one. The result was that soon the tiger’s claws were tangled in the greasy, heavy, armor-like mane of the lion—and useless. While those of King Edward ripped at the foe until Dan sank to the cage floor, a stricken, gasping, disembowelled thing. Then—and not until then—King Edward ceased his attack, disengaged his mane from the now useless claws of the Bengal, and went back to his feast!