DANCING BEARS IN COSTUME.
Little bears are intensely amusing, and they display a great fondness for romping and playing. We have known of hunters bringing cubs home, and adopting them, as it were, into their families, the bears becoming exceedingly familiar, sleeping with the children, and eating from their bowls of bread and milk, climbing into the hunter’s lap and licking his face, and, in fact, making themselves perfectly at home. As they grow old, however, they are liable to become enraged at teasing or other provocation and to be dangerous.
Bears sometimes acquire a fondness for liquor, and this article is in some cases used by trainers as an inducement or reward for performing. Cake, candy, and like treats are also powerful incentives with bears. A writer in one of the magazines describes a huge bear whose acquaintance he made in New Orleans, belonging to a Spaniard who kept a public house in the vicinity of that city. This bear had contracted so great a liking for whiskey and sugar, that he became troublesome unless he had his liquor and his spree, and no one could mistake the cause of his conduct when “fuddled.” He rolled from side to side, leered ridiculously and smiled foolishly, and was loving and savage by turns. He would wrap his great paw around the tumbler containing “the poison,” go through the ceremony of touching glasses with the gentleman who paid for the treat, and then pour the contents down his capacious throat with a gusto that made old topers “love that animal like one of themselves.”
PERFORMING BEARS.
BEAR AND PONY ACT.
Buffaloes have also been drafted into the service of the circus, but their performances are in no way remarkable—except, perhaps, for the very absence of anything remarkable. The fierce monster who, with steaming nostrils and flaming eyes, is represented on the circus posters as recklessly dashing over palisade-like fences, is usually found in sober fact to be a dejected looking animal of very moderate proportions, requiring vigorous punching to induce him to trot around the ring and leap the low “hurdles” the “general utility” men hold for him. His greatest aim in life appears to be to avoid hurting his shins while going over these barriers.
Buffalo training is nothing but reducing the animal to submission, which a few applications of the horse taming straps will usually accomplish. Then he is driven around the ring until he learns to keep up a steady trot, after which the hurdles are placed in his way and he made to leap over, by the trainer’s assistants standing so as to cut off his retreat, and the trainer goading him forward. In obstinate cases a ring is attached to the animal’s nose in the same manner as with bulls.
