WOULD YOU TRUST AN ELEPHANT?

Dunstan Times, Issue 3131, 21 August 1922, Page 7

WOULD YOU TRUST AN ELEPHANT?

(By H. W. Seaman). -

So the Committee' on Performing Animals ranks elephants with the “domesticated and docile creatures,” such as horses and dogs, and not with the “savage and untrustworthy animals capable of injuring their trainers.” I must write to a. circus friend about this, because it contradicts all he has told me in many long conversations about elephants. He is an elephant keeper, at present on tour in South America. I know what his reply will be. I can guess at the very words:— “Docile ? Say, docile is the one thing an elephant is everything else but. Trustworthy? The only thing I would trust an elephant to do is to stay dead once he is dead. Domesticated? If you saw what a couple of elephants could do with a three-ring circus when they cut loose, you wouldn’t want me to tell you that an elephant has exactly the same domestic instincts as a tornado, and no more. If these select committee guys know anything about elephants, I’ll make a watch.” That is how he would reply. These are some of the things he has told me about elephants, which, by the way, he calls by their circus name, “bulls.” A herd of circus elephants is ruled by a queen. She gives her orders by untranslatable snorts and trumpetings, and occasionally enforces them by vigorous prods. She is usually the oldest and wisest elephant .in the herd, and the others obey her because they foci that what she does is for their safety. Trouble, when it comes, is usually caused by the younger male elephants, in whom she inspires respect by scolding and even spanking. The queen of the herd owes allegiance to one person alone—the keeper of the elephants. The voice of no other human being has the slightest influence ou her. She has known him a long time, and trusts him. He has not become keeper of the elephants at a day’s notice, but has lived with them for a year or more before assuming control, and his salary is one that even a motion picture star would respect. It is when he is absent that trouble is likely to come. A fit of temper'ament on the part of one member of the herd may cause it. The feast likely circumstance may cause 1 that fit of temperament. Elephants' that have been broken to gunfire, brass bands playing “The Gladiators” and “La. Heine' de Saba..” steam calliopes, roaring lions, and heath fires have been known to fly in panic at such a simple, but unusulal, sound as the whistle of a steamboat. And when panic comes there is havoc. No ropes can hold an angry or frightened elephant, for if the ropes are fastened to a. wall, dbwn comes the wall. A herd of elephants, stampeded by the unwonted sight of a string of sandwiehmen, Can he as irresistible and a® devastating as a charging regiment of dragoons. _ • “When one of the big cats gets out of his cage,” said my circus, friend one day, “the first thing he thinks about is getting back. He is generally too scared to do any rampaging, unless somebody annoys him. Elepihants are not like that. They just go straight ahead, and it is mighty unlucky for anybody or anything that gets in their way.”