But ’tis upon the heads of nails.”
[5] Jules Lemaître, Impressions de Théâtre, Second Series.
[p107]
CHAPTER V. THE TRAINERS.
It is difficult to see how man would have fared if he had not compelled the animals to serve him. The science of animal-training must therefore date back to the earliest stages of the world’s history; and we may believe that artistic training is almost as old. The dwellers in caves had not yet invented the game of fox and geese, and they must have found some difficulty in amusing themselves in the long winter evenings; they therefore probably taught their dumb companions the art of leaping and showing off.
Now that animal-training has become a lucrative profession, competition has forced the trainers to rival each other, and their skill has obtained wonderful results. All the inmates of Noah’s Ark have passed under the whip, from minute insects to Jumbo himself. Men have tamed serpents, birds, cats, dogs, goats, monkeys, seals, and pigs. In their desire to grasp and conquer increasing difficulties, they have even [p108] taken the fleas from the animals they were training, have bridled the fleas themselves, and taught them to draw a carriage. Do you remember Virgil’s lines upon a stallion for the first time subject to the yoke? The poet dwells with rapture upon the vigorous bounds which wrench the plough from the furrows. What would he have said of the spring of a flea, which, at liberty, jumps one hundred and forty times its own height?
If you wish to know all the mysteries of animal-training, an art based upon definite rules which vary very little in their application to the instincts of the different pupils, I recommend you to read a book which will surprise you. It was written by Professor G. J. Romanes, secretary of the London Zoological Linnean Society, and has been translated into French for the “International Scientific Library.” It is called the Intelligence of Animals. You need only glance at the first volume, which refers to the intelligence of molluscs, ants, termites, white ants, spiders, scorpions, and the lower articulated animals. But you should carefully study the chapters in the second volume devoted to birds, the cat, dog, baboons, and elephant. I fancy that if any of you are partisans of the Cartesian doctrine, and hitherto only regarded animals as clocks with better regulated machinery than our own, you will leave off reading considerably shaken in your assurance.
The saltimbanque, who is not a creator of systems à priori, but whose philosophy is purely experimental, has, for a long time, observed the regularity with which animals follow the same habits. Upon this observation he has based his method of training them. [p109]
Whatever the animal may be which he wishes to train, he commences by watching it closely, endeavouring to discover not only the usual habits of the race, but the personal disposition of the individual in question. One specimen raises itself naturally upon its hind legs, another is born with a talent for jumping. . . . And this axiom prevails in every case under training: “Animals are never forced to execute, at the command and will of others, any movements which are not natural to them in a free state.” Monkeys love to swing in the tropical creepers: they are placed on a trapèze; a goat seeks for pointed rocks—he is a natural equilibrist: so he is taught to balance himself on the neck of a bottle; a dog instinctively rises on his hind legs to seize a morsel of sugar held out to him. He must learn to maintain himself in the same position.