“Prince!” called McPherson. The small male, apparently asleep, opened its eyes, stared calmly for an instant, then closed them again.
“Janet!” The same thing happened with the big female.
“Rajah!” The crossed-eyed tiger raised his head and hissed, his long yellow teeth disclosed from furling lips.
“Major!” There was no response. The fourth tiger did not recognize the call; it merely lay there, eyes closed, dormant. The trainer shrugged his shoulders.
“Lunkhead!” he exclaimed. “Doesn’t even know his own name. If he can’t learn his name, how is he going to learn tricks?”
By which little experiment had a great deal been explained. Prince and Janet had shown by their calm recognition that they not only could understand the distinct name by which they had been designated, but that also the voice of the man who called it brought no malice or enmity. The actions of Rajah, the inbred, had been of a different nature; the application of the name had caused snarling rebellion, indicative of revolt should the animal ever be taken into the training den. Major—well, Major was no more than McPherson had called him; a lunkhead, without even enough brains to know when he was spoken to. And this kind of an animal is even more dangerous than the one which is plainly and openly rebellious against human control.
In fact, in the menagerie, he occupies the same position that the “harmless imbecile” does in the human strata. For years he may amble through life, allowing the world and all it contains to go past him. Then suddenly, he goes mad.
An instance of this happened recently with John Helliott, a trainer for one of the big shows. His exhibit was short of tigers, and merely to “dress the act” he took into the arena with the rest of the big cats an animal which had always been looked upon as a harmless, amiable dunce. There was little training; Helliott did not want the Bengal to do more than merely sit upon its pedestal, a thing comparatively easy, for the beast apparently was too lazy to desire to do anything else.
So week after week it went on; the cat came forth from the chute, stretched itself, then went to its seat, there to sit vacuously until the act was over. Then one day, something happened.
It was nothing new. Nothing but what had happened twice every day during the whole of the tiger’s term as an actor, a clown “walk around,” in which one of the circus funsters made the circuit of the hippodrome track in the guise of a radio fan, with a contraption upon his head designed to represent a broadcasting apparatus, from which there spluttered sparks and the constant crackle of electricity. It had been going on ever since the season had started. But the tiger simply hadn’t noticed it, that was all. On this occasion its vacant eyes happened to be turned in that direction. It saw the sparks; it heard the queer crackling noise, it went crazy with fear. When a frenzied tent was finally stilled again, they carried John Helliott forth to four weeks in a hospital, the victim of a “harmless imbecile.”