A CIRCUS is a great place for natural development. There’s not much “book learnin’,” it’s true; but practicability is a thing which is understood to the last degree. The sideshow talker may slaughter the English language, but he practices more active psychology than the professor who lectures upon the subject. The lot superintendent may not know a monsoon from a period of barometric depression, but he can tell hours beforehand whether the performance will be held in fair weather or foul. The boss hostler never saw the interior of a veterinary school, yet circus horses, despite their hardships, are healthier, better cared for and sleeker than the usual occupants of a riding school. So it goes throughout the whole establishment, up to and including the trained animal department. In this latter are to be found some of the strangest developments of all.
Perhaps, at some time or another, perched high upon the reserves, you’ve seen the animal acts, and wondered a bit about them: why certain beasts are selected for certain tricks and why others are not used at all. Or perhaps the thought never entered your head; so far as you were concerned, all animals were alike.
But to the man down in the steel arena, it has been a different story. Everything—conforming to the rule of the circus—must have its reason. The tiger which rides about the big cage on the back of an elephant may be the best of its kind, leaping through flaming hoops without the slightest concern, but utterly worthless in a simple “group number” where it may have but a single duty during the whole act. In the first place, that tiger may have a single-track mind, such as many persons have, capable of assimilating only a certain routine. And on the other hand, it may be a hardened criminal, with a murder lust so highly developed that its very presence in a den with other animals would mean a fight to the death. Or again, it may be mentally unbalanced, or still worse, an outcast from the society of its kind and destined to extermination the minute it seeks the presence of other tigers. All these things count in the menagerie of the circus of to-day; things are a bit different from the olden times, when an animal was only an animal.
In fact, within the last twenty years, there has been a complete turnover in the animal business. Methods of training have changed from ones of undoubted cruelty to those in which the beasts work for a reward, just as a man or woman works for a living. Greatest of all, there has been a change to a system where the beauty or grace of a beast is placed secondary to the condition of its mentality. No longer is an animal selected simply because it is a “good looker.” There is something far more important,—the brain.
Not long ago, I roamed into the menagerie of a Mid-Western circus to find Bob McPherson, the cat trainer, sitting in front of a den containing four Sumatran tigers. Apparently he was merely resting there, a newspaper in his hands, reading awhile, then watching the tigers. The next day it was the same and the next after that. Then I asked questions.
“New cats,” answered the trainer in his jerky fashion. “Just in from Hamburg. Got to break two of ’em on the road—short in the big act. So I thought I’d put ’em through their sprouts first and pick ’em out so I wouldn’t get any more scars on me. Got four hundred and eighty-eight now. That’s enough. Don’t want any more. Breaking cats on the road’s dangerous work, unless you’re pretty sure of ’em. Just about got ’em picked out. Guess it’ll be that littlest male and the big female. Those other two—don’t like ’em. One of ’em batty and the other one’s a dunce.”
For Bob McPherson had been doing something more than merely sitting there in front of the tiger den and idly watching a set of cats when he wasn’t busy with his newspaper. He had been applying a set of mental tests to his prospective students, crude perhaps in comparison, yet fully as efficient for his purpose as the Binet test by which the human mind is catalogued.
One tiger had been eliminated from the beginning and in a glance. He was cross-eyed, which to the ordinary person would mean nothing.
But the trainer who takes a cross-eyed tiger into the arena with him also takes the chance of being carried out a huddled, bleeding mass, in a piece of canvas. Crossed eyes in a human mean little. Crossed eyes in a tiger mean that somewhere in the past there has been misbreeding; that a brother and sister or father and daughter have mated, bringing into the world a thing that is warped in intelligence, lacking in mental poise and balance, and with a predilection toward murder. And so the cross-eyed Sumatran had been passed by without further examination.
As to the others their every action had been watched by the trainer; the manner in which they fed, voracity with which they attacked their food, their actions when the crowds came into the big tent, their attitude toward the cage boy and toward his steel scraper when he came to clean the dens.