The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations

7. A silk hat was balanced on its rim. 8. A seal carrying a balanced ball scrambled upon a cylindrical basket and rolled it across the arena, after which other seals repeated the performance. 9. In the last act a flaming torch was balanced, tossed about, caught and whirled, and finally returned to the trainer, still blazing. Trained Horses. By carefully selecting the brightest and most intelligent horses that can be found, it is possible for a trainer to bring together and educate a group that will go through a fine performance in public. However, some exhibitions of trained horses are halting, ragged and poor. I have seen only one that stands out in my records as superlatively fine,--for horses. That was known to the public when I saw it as Bartholomew's "Equine Paradox," and it contained twelve wonderfully trained horses. My record of this fine performance fills seven pages of a good-sized notebook. While it is too long to reproduce here entire, it can at least be briefly described. The trainer called his group a "school," and of it he said: "While I do not say that any one horse knows the meaning of from 300 to 400 words, I claim that as a whole the school does know that number." The performance was fairly bewildering; but by diligent work I recorded the whole of it. Various horses did various things. They fetched chairs, papers, hats and coats; opened desks, rang bells, came when called, bowed, knelt, and erased figures from a blackboard. They danced a waltz, a clog dance, a figure-8; they marched, halted, paced, trotted, galloped, backed, jumped, leaped over each other, performed with a barrel, a see-saw and a double see-saw. Their marching and drilling would have been creditable to a platoon of rookies.