Ill] 



PSYCHOLOGY AND TRAINING 



25 



treatment. If the horse has been made obedient 

 in the first place there will be little fear of re- 

 action, so there will be little need of punish- 

 ment ; a little may have to be used at times when 

 he becomes lazy or disinterested, to remind him 

 who is master. But he must never be nagged 

 at, and, as we have said, should always be 

 caressed a short time after the punishment. 



93. In the earlier stages of all these per- 

 formances the horse's education is assisted by 

 the trainer going through the same action with 

 his own body and limbs ; e.g. when the horse 

 is asked to walk the trainer should walk, when 

 asked to trot the trainer should run, when asked 

 to turn about the trainer should do the same, 

 and so on. The horse always watches the move- 

 ments of his trainer very intently. 



It is absolutely necessary that the circus 

 should be enclosed to prevent the horse's atten- 

 tion being distracted, as his whole attention must 

 be concentrated upon his trainer. He will thus 

 notice slight movements made by the trainer ; 

 therefore the trainer must be most careful not to 

 make movements that the horse may read as 

 signals, unless they are meant as such. The 

 horse's eye is so keen in observing his master's 

 signals that, when his training is well advanced, 

 the trainer can signal to the horse to perform 

 all kinds of acts by signals that the audience 

 will be unable to detect. It must be remem- 

 bered that careful gradation is necessary in train- 

 ing the mind as well as the body. A lesson 

 should never be allowed to weary a horse and 

 make him thus dislike his work. If he is too 

 fresh at the beginning of the lesson, he must be 

 exercised before the lesson is continued. It is 

 very easy to spoil a horse by asking him to obey 

 one's signals when he is too fresh. 



94. The principle of training a horse to hold, 

 and afterwards to pick up, a handkerchief is 

 simple : A white handkerchief soaked in sugar 

 solution, or whatever the horse is fond of, is 

 offered to him. A finger is passed into his 

 mouth to cause him to open it and the handker- 

 chief is placed inside ; the thumb and forefinger 

 are then used to keep the lips closed ; should he 

 drop it he will be spoken to severely and made 

 to take hold of it again. Upon tasting the sugar 

 the horse will probably like to keep hold of the 

 handkerchief ; every time the horse drops the 

 handkerchief he will be spoken to severely, but 

 caressed whenever he holds it for any length of 

 time. While teaching these actions words of 

 command will also be used, so that eventually 

 the horse will take hold of the handkerchief upon 

 being told to. Similarly signs will be given. 

 The tricks which can be taught to a horse upon 

 these principles, i.e. giving signals with the 

 body, hands or whip, and at the same time utter- 

 ing commands, are very many, and are particu- 

 larly pleasing to the public, because they think 

 the horse understands the words. The horse 



E 



pays more attention to the trainer's movements 

 than he does to the voice. Thus a horse is taught 

 to pick up blocks of wood, to stop, to paw the 

 ground, to nod his head affirmatively or nega- 

 tively, to count, etc., upon certain signals from 

 his trainer. In this way he answers " yes " or 

 "no" to questions, counts the time by pawing 

 the ground, stops at a certain letter block and 

 picks it up, thus spelling words, etc. 



95. After a while the horse will learn to 

 carry on the various actions consecutively in the 

 right order, because he will every day be asked 

 to perform them in the same order. A horse 

 that will stop at a given signal can thus be told 

 to point out the lady in the black hat in the front 

 row, and so on. The best method to teach the 

 horse to stop as above is to use a black strong 

 thread attached to a bridle, and when it is de- 

 sired to stop him to pull on to the thread, to say 

 " Whoa ! " and to make a certain slight move- 

 ment with the arm and whip, say, towards his 

 forelegs ; later the thread will be dispensed with, 

 and then the voice, the act being performed 

 merely by the signal. A thread will also be 

 used in leading the horse to a row of letters when 

 teaching him to spell. Whenever he obeys he 

 will be caressed and shown that he has done 

 right; he will thus associate the act with the 

 caresses and tit-bits. 



96. In days of old it was thought that 

 peculiar-smelling oil had a peculiar effect upon 

 horses, and that horse-trainers could do wonder- 

 ful things with horses by the use of these strong- 

 smelling oils. There is no doubt that good re- 

 sults were never obtained from the use of these 

 oils. 



The things we see circus horses perform ap- 

 pear marvellous to those who do not understand 

 how they are done ; and circus-horse owners 

 have kept up this idea of marvellous power by 

 keeping their methods secret. I have gone into 

 the methods of training circus horses rather 

 fully in order to show that a horse can be edu- 

 cated only by kindness ; that the methods adopted 

 by all modern horse-trainers are humane ones, 

 punishment being resorted to only when wilful 

 disobedience is quite evident. The training of 

 the horse is very like that of a child, except that, 

 as stated before, the uneducated horse has very 

 little intelligence, but an ample amount of 

 instinct, whilst the uneducated child has very 

 little instinct but a certain amount of intel- 

 ligence. 



97. Before leaving this subject I must re- 

 mind animal lovers that the means adopted in 

 training other performing animals are often very 

 cruel, and I have been surprised and disgusted 

 to see that some dogs have been trained by cruel 

 methods. Such dogs, however, perform in a 

 different manner from those trained by kind 

 methods, and observant animal trainers can 

 easily detect these animals on the stage. The 



