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c h a p t e r s i x Going Off Script In 1900, impresario August Kober pondered the great irony of circus history. The ambition of man’s domination over beasts had long been a theme in circus advertising and performance, he said. Yet, circus people everywhere knew they relied upon animal power they controlled only through systematic confinement and an ability to persuade animals to either fear or respect human keepers. Thinking of the fragile human-animal relationships that made the cultural and financial success of his business possible, Kober imagined: “If those twenty-one elephants really woke up one day and became conscious of their strength, how easily they would burst their chains! They could pound their platform to bits, tear down their canvas stable and wreck our entire circus, if they but knew their own power, and every night that I take a promenade through our circus stables with their hosts of elephants, lions, tigers, bears, leopards and buffaloes, I visualize such an awakening of the animal kingdom.”1 Kober’s disturbing visions revealed that on some conscious or unconscious level many circus people believed that their animals might smash the means of their captivity if they understood the nature of human power in the world. Kober drew up the metaphor of an elephant tricked by humans into forgetting his own power to indicate to circus fans the mystery at the root of modern circus entertainment: Why did powerful animals like elephants tolerate puny human beings? Why were they so easily intimidated by a person with a chain and a pitchfork? Why did they not band together to defeat their keepers? Elephants had sentience and an agency that helped them respond to circus managers and trainers and to survive for periods of years in a series of menageries or circuses, but they possessed no human understanding of the cultures that built and organized those ventures, and they had no real power to challenge their captivity in an organized or lasting manner. Kober and others banked on that fact. Day after day, year after year, most captive animals acquiesced to human direction by performing on cue. Most refrained from overpowering the circus staff and running away. Thus circus companies were able to provide the spectacle of potentially dangerous animals performing for human amusement by way of behavior-modification regimes that endeavored to draw out of elephants actions 176 Entertaining Elephants that served the company while suppressing behaviors that did not. It was this skill that gave the circus impresarios and animal trainers their reputation for modernity and efficiency in exploiting and regulating the risks of animal power. Nonetheless, with their massive herds and mobile containment and behaviormodification practices, the biggest circuses were testing the limits of the elephants in their possession. Their elephants struggled to keep healthy and calm while unable to satisfy hardwired urges to walk, fully explore their surroundings with the trunk, browse for food, or interact freely with other elephants. They weaved and rocked to survive in small spaces, laboring with the resulting suppressed immune systems and undiagnosed infections, chronic foot disease, or stuntdriven arthritis. They tolerated hands-on management out of fear of the men who subdued them, the pain of the goad, and the barn man’s pitchfork. Many circus people believed elephants did so only by suppressing their desires to strike out at their keepers and trainers, grab hooks and pitchforks, or simply walk through the tent wall to find the hay pile or the pond they could smell nearby. The circuses could stretch their elephants like elastic, but only so far. Some elephants reached a point at which, for whatever reason, they could no longer muddle through. By the turn of the twentieth century, to the American public, many modern circus elephants did indeed seem furious at the circuses and liable to destroy them, just as Kober had imagined. An increasing number had been making dramatic news since the 1880s by breaking out of enclosures or walking or running from parades or the circus tent to smash property, injure or kill people , horses, and other menagerie animals, thereby exposing moments when industrial circuses had only a tenuous control over their captives. Certainly, audiences had long seen bull elephants portrayed as destructive brutes. The worrying new reality was that female elephants were instigating just as many destructive events. The circuses would struggle to assuage public fears, but they erred by applying to females the same cliché of elephant as furious...

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