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2. ENDANGERED SPECIES – IN ABUNDANCE

2.5   Reward & Punishment

Citing the views of Dr Heini Hediger, the renowned zoologist who is commonly credited with being the "father of the scientific zoo", the RSPCA asserts that fear plays a central role in animal training and dressage: "Virtually all animals have distinctive flight motivations which may be measured by a quantitative value - the flight distance. If a potential enemy comes within the flight distance of an animal, it will attempt to flee. If confined and unable to retreat, the animal will cower, show 'fear' and issue a low intensity threat. If the intruder continues to approach, a critical distance is reached, at which the insecure, apparently cowering animal will attack. Thus the lion trainer's 'skill' is largely based on the ability to assess this critical distance." For those who know how to read animal behaviour, the RSPCA continues, this fear is apparent in almost every wild animal act. "Ear and tail movements, facial expressions, body postures and vocalisation provide a fairly accurate indication of the animal's experience. In the circus ring, the big cats frequently display these signals very clearly. They will often respond to the trainer's commands by slinking across the ring, belly close to the ground, ears flattened, sometimes snarling loudly. A clear indication of fear. Aggression is often the first response to fear, and a lion or tiger may be seen to paw threateningly at an outstretched whip. An audience may well misinterpret these aggressive approaches, and marvel all the more at the trainer's daring."

For the performing circus animal, food may also become the incentive for it to accomplish the desired dressage tricks of its trainer. A wildcat being trained to stand on its hind legs, for example, will generally be more co-operative if it is hungry and then coaxed into obeying its master with occasional pieces of meat. While such methods are often condemned as cruel and coercive, others maintain that food deprivation and reward keeps the animals active and healthy. Thomas Althaus: "If these animals were to be fed and watered all the time, they would not run around and do things. You see this in zoos or safari parks - where they have more space and food. They just stuff themselves and go to sleep again. So I think it's good to give them a little bit of exercise."

Though ever-careful to distance himself from the other scandal-afflicted enterprises run by the Chipperfield clan, Jim Clubb insists that cruelty to animals is now a thing of the past. "It may have been common in the last century, but not any more. To get the best out of an animal you have to treat it with respect and today the vast majority of animal trainers realise that." The same view is echoed by Malcolm Clay, a Lancashire solicitor who is Secretary of the Association of Circus Proprietors: "Circus animals are very expensive, much-loved creatures. Nobody in a well-run circus would dream of treating them with cruelty or neglect." But Fred Kurt is adamant that cruelty is still a way of life in many travelling animal shows. "Knie is very proud that its animal training is made during public visiting times to the menagerie," he points out, "but tell me why the training of young elephants is not to be seen by the public?" Yet the training of elephant calfs in the circus ring has been witnessed by some independent observers, including the celebrated Swiss artist Hans Falk, who spent about twelve months travelling with Circus Knie between 1977 and 1979. With soulful compassion, Falk speaks of the animals which inspired him to draw and paint as he toured the country with Knie in his own circus caravan. "It was so very beautiful to see the power of the elephant - this great power and yet this quietness, this gentleness," he remembers. Recalling one of the first training sessions of the young African elephant Malayka, Falk says: "They were training her to do a kind of balancing act, walking over a wooden plank only about 50 centimetres off the ground. But the elephant refused to do it - she was afraid. After a while, the trainer and even Louis Knie lost their tempers and began to use a stick with a metal hook on the end, pushing and pulling her. They wanted to get the act ready in the shortest possible time but the elephant was just unable to do it. Then in this certain moment it became a little hell in the circus ring. The trainer beat the elephant on the legs until there was blood."

According to Fred Kurt, such brutality can be common in the training of wild animals in the circus. While hastening to affirm that he regards Knie as one of the finest circuses in Europe, he also adds, somewhat mordantly, that "the best of the worst doesn't have to be a good one." Today, he says, there are many circus trainers who equip themselves with sharpened sticks, screwdrivers or walking sticks with nails concealed in the crook and tip to control or prod the desired response from a stubborn animal. Unnoticed by the public, he adds, there are also circuses where electric shocks are used - a method that was even employed by Knie in the past: "The presenter of the act may have artificial flowers in his hand for instance, and these flowers are connected with two wires to a battery, hidden somewhere in his costume. In much the same way as pigs are driven into the slaughter house, this method may be used to make old elephants stand up on their hind legs when they are just too weak to do so. Even Knie recently sold elephants because their backs had become weak through overwork." Kurt asserts that elephants are physically unsuited for such strenuous dressage techniques. "A young elephant can be made to do these tricks," he says, "but as it grows older and heavier, you reach the point where their muscles can't take the strain of lifting the whole body weight any more. And even to train these little ones is a problem. There is a long-standing joke in the circus: 'you know how an elephant learns to stand on one leg? You just have to beat the other ones.'"

Recently, an article in the Italian magazine Nuova Elettronica revealed that the editorial staff's technical service had been approached to produce a "micro-electroshock" device to train circus animals, powered by a 9-volt battery. Declared the magazine:

Ironically, as international conservation treaties cut-off the supply of Asian elephants, such cruelties may become more common, claims Kurt. Because of the ensuing scramble to obtain the few that are obtainable from plantations, some circuses are now having to resort to the African elephant which is weaker and less heavily built than its Asian cousin - and therefore even less adept at performing arduous dressage tricks such as forming pyramids and standing on their heads. Because of this, says Kurt, "there will be beatings of elephants even in the very best of circuses."

While some of the internationally renowned circuses may have suspended overt systematic cruelty such as delivering electric shocks to animals during training sessions, many circuses, under constant economic pressure to produce unique and ever-more spectacular acts to the public, find themselves with no alternative but to use the stick or riding crop. "In many Italian circuses for instance," says Kurt, "even a casual visitor would be able to see the wounds of the elephants. Because one way to stop elephants or to make them run is to push a sharp stick between the nails. There the skin is usually not well maintained because the elephants can't bathe enough and can't rub and groom themselves, and there you can see the wounds. And of course, they are very sensitive there. Just imagine, always being given pain in the bed of your nails - it hurts tremendously." Dr Rolf Keller considers this kind of abuse virtually inevitable in the circus: "They use these pointed sticks even with sharp, knife-like edges - and I've heard that it's used regularly between the toes. I would say if you have to train elephants in a circus and have to be around elephants, you need some kind of pointed stick. They brought the method over from India - where it's used everywhere. But it's difficult to say whether it's a bad thing or not because that depends on how the stick is used. In Basel zoo we used sticks - not very sharp - but we never used them at the foot - never."

Despite the much-vaunted "soft-dressage" techniques championed by Carl Hagenbeck which are themselves rooted in coercive mental control, even Fredy Knie Snr., patriarch of the Knie dynasty, states that "50% of the dressage of horses today is criminal." Declares Nancy Burnet of the California-based Coalition to Protect Animals in Entertainment: "Animals in entertainment are treated second only to those used in research laboratories. The animals that endure the most abuse at the hands of the entertainment industry are probably elephants and primates. Elephants are hit with axe handles or beaten with sledgehammers - primates are beaten with axe handles or rubber hoses filled with sand or pebbles." She adds that it is not unusual for animals in the entertainment industry to be dyed, drugged, burned, beaten regularly and have their food withheld. An orang-utan, for example, was fatally beaten with an axe-handle while under training for the Hollywood movie "Every Which Way But Loose," starring Clint Eastwood. Similar cruelty was reported in 1988 by actor Howard Mann in the filming of a television commercial on behalf of a company producing suntan lotion. Mann was to act the role of Tarzan, while a performing chimpanzee called 'Mister Kokomo' was chosen to play Cheetah. After spending all day outside gathering coconuts for dinner, Tarzan was to return home sun-burned and hence in dire need of lotion. The chimpanzee would then pick up the can and spray him on the back, as Tarzan declared, "Good Cheetah, make my day!" Mann reports that the chimpanzee was somewhat less than adept in acting out its pre-assigned role, spraying him first in the face and then on the chest. After 3 hours and 40 takes, the lotion was at last being directed at the right place on the Tarzan hulk, but in the process, the all-important brand-name was hidden from the camera. Having lost the last shreds of his temper, the unidentified trainer, screaming at the chimpanzee, dragged the animal out of sight behind some bushes. Mann then heard what he calls "a loud crashing whack and a series of heart-rending moans." Seeing the expressions of disgust on the faces of those present on the film lot when he returned with the anguished chimp, the trainer announced, according to Mann's recollection: "You gotta remember! These are animals. You can't be too nice to them. They don't understand that. You have to show who's boss, see?" The subdued chimp, Mann reported, finally got the scene right.

Occasionally, overt animal abuse may even be evident in the circus arena before a packed house, as I myself witnessed during a matineebeginning of their performance of the Circo Italiano in Marseilles, in November 1988. From the very performance, the circus' troupe of tigers seemed unusually nervous and disconcerted, displaying indifference to the commands of thewell-rehearsed act disintegrate dompteur who himself rapidly began to lose his composure seeing his before the public. The final embarrassment came when one pedestal-sitting tiger decided to repay his tormentors in the audience by spraying them with a jet of urine, leaving some unfortunate mothers and children in the front row to frantically wipe their faces. Finally, consumed with rage, the trainer hurled a metal bar at one tiger, and overturned a pedestal on another.

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