OF ANIMAL TRAINING
India,--land of waning wonders,--has a great name for the training of
animals, a pursuit in which the people are popularly believed to attain
marvellous success by reason of special aptitudes and faculties. In the
yellow-backed romances of the boulevard Orientalism in which the French
indulge, Indian princes and princesses are habitually attended by trained
leopards and tigers, while English writers dwell on the skill of the
trainers. But seen from near and compared with what has been done and is
now done in other countries, the wonder pales a little. Nothing half so
squarely attempted and completely accomplished as the modern European and
American training of wild beasts in performances foreign to their nature
and habits has ever been thought of in India. It should be noted, to begin
with, that only persons of low caste ever engage in this pursuit, which
demands peculiar qualities of hand, will, and temper, and cannot be learned
as easily as wood-sawing. These people have a wonderful knowledge of
woodcraft, and are fearless with the creatures they know so well. They can
catch and tame, but, at the risk of falling into the pestilent error of
hair-splitting, I venture to discriminate between taming and training. The
first is the most important part but not nearly the whole of the latter,
and it is the first only which is well done.
But as to training as indicated, for example, in the deservedly popular
works of the late Rev. J. G. Wood, it may be worth while to look a little
nearer. This authority wrote that "in India trained otters are almost as
common as trained dogs." But they are not used throughout Hindustan, nor in
Central India, nor in the Punjab, where they are found in great numbers,
and in the regions where they help in fishing they are never seen out of
the hands of their owners, obscure river-side tribes. They are only
employed in the back waters of Cochin, in part of Bengal, and on the Indus
river. All that we see of the otter in Britain is a poor little beast
desperately fighting for its life against murderous crowds of dogs and men;
but in reality there are few animals of more amiability, talent, and
docility. A Scottish gamekeeper once trained one to go with dogs, and used
to say it was the best cur in the pack. They are effectually tamed in
India, which is an easy matter, and they practise for the benefit of the
fisherman the art to which they are ordained by nature. The cormorant and
the pelican are also used by the Indus boatmen as in China for fishing. The
pelican, though furnished by nature with the finest game-bag or creel ever
carried by angler, is inferior to the cormorant (_Graculus carbo_) as a
fisherman. Both these birds, like the otter, fish by nature, nor could
Buckland or Cholmondeley-Pennell teach them a turn of their craft. It is
certainly interesting to see the hooded cormorants on the fishermen's
house-boats and the otters tethered to stakes near, playing with the no
less amphibious children and behaving like the playful, intelligent
water-cats they are. But both this sight and the knowledge that they are
used in this wise are distinctly _un_common and out of the range of the
people of India at large.
[Illustration: A HUNTING CHEETAH]
The same writer also descants on the great powers of Orientals in training
the cheetah or hunting leopard (_Felis jubata_). In this instance the only
point where real skill comes into play is in the first capture of the adult
animal, when it has already learned the swift bounding onset,--its one
accomplishment. The young cheetah is not worth catching, for it has not
learned its trade, nor can it be taught in captivity! The Christian
Missionary is occasionally asked to state exactly how he proposes to
convert the heathen man, and he sensibly concludes, as a rule, to begin
with the child. The problem of how to catch uninjured so powerful and
active a beast as the hunting leopard seems as difficult as the conversion
of the heathen adult. In practice, however, it is simple. There are certain
trees where these great dog-cats (for they have some oddly canine
characteristics) come to play and whet their claws. The hunters find such a
tree, arrange deer-sinew nooses round it, and await the event. The animal
comes and is caught by a leg, and it is at this point the trouble begins.
It is no small achievement for two or three naked, ill-fed men to secure so
fierce a captive and carry him home on a cart. Then his training commences.
He is tied in all directions, principally from a thick grummet of rope
round his loins, while a hood fitted over his head effectually blinds him.
He is fastened on a strong cot bedstead, and the keepers and their wives
and families reduce him to submission by starving him and keeping him
awake. His head is made to face the village street, and for an hour at a
time several times a day his keepers make pretended rushes at him and wave
cloths, staves, and other articles in his face. He is talked to
continually, and women's tongues are believed to be the most effective
anti-soporifics. No created being could resist the effects of hunger, want
of sleep, and feminine scolding, and the poor cheetah becomes piteously,
abjectly tame. He is taken out for a walk, occasionally, if a slow crawl
between four attendants, all holding hard, can be called a walk, and his
promenades are always through the most crowded bazaars, where the keepers'
friends are to be found. The street dog snarls and growls from a safe
distance at the little procession, and occasionally a child, suddenly
catching sight of the strange beast, breaks into a frightened cry; but the
people on the whole are rather pleased than otherwise to see the Raja's
cheetahs among them.
[Illustration: A RESTLESS BEDFELLOW]
It is difficult to give a just idea of the curious intimacy with animals
that exists in India among those who have charge of them. The cheetah's
bedstead is like that of the keeper, and when the creature is tamed,
leopard and man are often curled under the same blanket. When his bedfellow
is restless, the keeper lazily stretches out an arm from his end of the cot
and dangles a tassel over the animal's head, which seems to soothe him. In
the early morning I have seen a cheetah sitting up on his couch, a red
blanket half-covering him, his tasselled red hood pushed awry, looking
exactly like an elderly gentleman in a night-cap as he yawned with the
irresolute air of one who is in doubt whether he will rise or turn in for
yet another nap. Of actual training in the field there is little or none.
So it is not wonderful that the cheetah loses its natural dash and is often
left behind by the antelope. At the wedding festivities of a Punjab chief
the other day (March 1886) the guests were shown this sport, and the
cheetah caught and killed a black-buck. But it was found that the Raja's
servants, by way of making quite sure, had first hamstrung the poor
antelope!
The ordained procedure is that the hooded leopard is taken afield on a cart
driven near a herd of black-buck, shown the game, and slipped. In a few
bounds he reaches and seizes it, is rewarded with a draught of blood, or a
morsel of liver in a wooden spoon, and put on his cart again; but there is
a large proportion of failures. And the creature is not practising a feat
he has been taught, but is merely let loose to perform an act he learned in
a wild state, which his keepers cannot teach, and for which, in fact, their
teaching seems to unfit him. I fail, therefore, to see where the
"wonderfully perfect training" of which the Rev. J. G. Wood speaks comes
in.
* * * * *
In some hunting pictures by Indian artists, the cart that bears the cheetah
and his keeper is drawn by a pair of black-buck antelopes, and you often
hear of the Nilghai also being trained to the yoke for Indian Princes. Nay,
there are Englishmen who have tried to harness these fine animals to the
buggy and the dog-cart. But though confidently reported, you may go far
before meeting with an authentic case of successful antelope-harnessing. An
Oriental hears vaguely of things of this nature, and promptly accepts them
as common and indubitable facts. In official life, speaking with Europeans,
he is learning to say, "I have _heard_," but in private he is as cock-sure
as a London literary man who has found a fallacy repeated in five books.
[Illustration: A BEAR LEADER]
Still less capacity is shown in the training of animals for street
performances. The bear, the monkey, the goat, and sometimes the bull, are
led abroad to fairs by men of low caste. The gray bear (_Ursus
isabellinus_) and the common black bear (_Ursus labiatus_) are most docile
creatures, and would repay good teaching. But the bear-leader is a man of
few and chance-hap meals, and though starvation and the stick make his
creatures gentle enough, he has not the wit to teach them well. Some
bear-leaders buckle a leather apron round their bodies and, thus protected,
pretend to wrestle with the poor beast; but a paralytic dance on his hind
legs, cadenced by jerks on his chain and blows with the staff, is the
usual depressing performance. No more complete picture of misery can be
imagined than that presented by a dancing bear on a hot day in a town in
the Plains, where there is no escape from the pitiless sun.
[Illustration: PERFORMING MONKEYS AND GOAT]
A goat and two or three monkeys are the actors in a little play that goes
on unceasingly all over India. Their leader is a picturesque tatterdemalion
who wanders far in search of audiences and is suspected of picking up more
than alms. The goat kneels as a salaam; sometimes he stands with all four
feet carefully adjusted on a pile of hour-glass-shaped blocks of wood, and
he serves as charger to the monkeys, who put on caps and coats and are
jerked to and fro by their chains in a sort of dance, their hungry eyes
intently watching the crowd for something to eat. They are Rajas going to
court, they are Lord Generals-in-Chief going to fight, they are champions
and swordsmen; and they do everything with sad indifference to the
accompaniment of a droning mechanical patter intoned with an air of
profound boredom. While confessing that this performance always makes me
melancholy, I must admit that children, for whom it is intended, and who
ought to be good judges, are delighted by it. To some generations of
Anglo-Indian children as well as countless hosts of native little ones it
has given a vast amount of gratification.
Dogs are so entirely neglected that the ordinary fetch-and-carry tricks of
an English spaniel or retriever are looked at with astonishment, and you
are listened to with polite incredulity when you describe the performances
of a good collie with sheep.
I have mentioned the elephant in another place, but while cordially
acknowledging that Indian mahouts have a complete and most intimate mastery
and knowledge of their own peculiar beast, I would point out that it is
naturally docile and gentle, and that American and English circus trainers
make the creature do more than the most skilful mahout has taught.
It is seldom in Northern India that the bulls led about by the
_quasi_-religious mendicants known as "Anandi" do more than shake their
heads or kneel at a sign of command. With a clever _boniment_ or patter
even this much might be made entertaining, but the patter is seldom clever.
In Southern India a bull and a cow are sometimes made to enact a quarrel
and a reconciliation, but there is not a showman in Europe who would
consider the animals taught to any purpose. So little contents an audience
of rustic Indian folk, and when you call your bull Rama, and your cow Sita,
and they are, to begin with, sacred and most cherished objects, there is
obviously no need for elaborate performances.
[Illustration: A PERFORMING BULL (MADRAS)]
As to horses, they are not so much trained as constrained, with the often
cruel constraint of a timorous hand. No animal throughout India is brought
to that wonderful pitch of education shown by the horses employed in
railway shunting yards in England, where trains are made up. At a word
these fine animals put forth a measured strength to set a carriage in
motion, at a gesture they stop or turn; they seem to know the intricate
points of the rails as well as the signalman; and, their service done, they
take up of themselves their own place in the labyrinth of iron, standing
unmoved while the locomotives go roaring and screaming past.
No, the Oriental is not a first-rate animal trainer. With almost boundless
patience, he has no steadfastness of aim, nor has he sufficient firmness of
hand and will to secure confidence and obedience.
Yet, while the art of training may not be very thoroughly understood, the
tribes which have to do with jungle life are often wonderful trackers and
highly skilled in woodcraft. Many English sportsmen in their talk, and some
sporting writers in their books, fail to do justice to the courage and
skill of the unarmed assistants on whom they depend for success. There are
many chases in which the honours ought to go to the bold and patient
trackers who mark down the game day after day, and manage to drive it up to
the guns of the well-fed English gentlemen, waiting serene and safe with a
battery of the best weapons London gunsmiths can provide. This mistake in
taste and judgment is not made by such masters as Sir S. Baker and Mr.
Sanderson, who show a friendly sympathy with their assistants.