THE TAMING OF YOUNG ANIMALS 221 



If they remain with the mother, they very often grow up even shyer 

 and more ntolerant of man than the mothers themselves. There 

 is no inherited docility or tameness, and a general survey of the 

 facts fully bears out my belief that the process of taming is almost 

 entirely a transference to human beings of the confidence and 

 affection that a young animal would naturally give its mother. 

 The process of domestication is different, and requires breeding 

 a race of animals in captivity for many generations, and gradually 

 weeding out those in which youthful tameness is replaced by the 

 wild instincts of adult life, and so creating a strain with new and 

 abnormal instincts. 



Apart from whether or no it lasts after a young animal has grown 

 up, the degree to which tameness can be carried depends on the 

 natural habits of the animals concerned, on their intelligence and 

 on their inborn instincts. Taming should be no more than taking 

 advantage of the natural instincts and guiding them in a slightly 

 new direction. It is quite true that animals of high intelligence 

 can be trained to do many things entirely outside their natural 

 range. If the animals have good memories and their trainer use 

 punishment freely, he can produce remarkable results, but I cannot 

 understand how persons who think that they are fond of animals 

 can endure seeing most of these tricks. A chimpanzee in evening 

 dress, lighting a cigarette and drinking brandy-and-soda on a 

 music-hall stage is a shameful abuse of man's power over the ape's 

 docility. Lions, tigers and polar bears snarling in a pyramid, 

 with the whip cracking and the iron bar and loaded pistol ready 

 to the hand of their trainer, can amuse only very stupid people, and 

 the performance is probably less dangerous than sword-swallowing. 



