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164 In 1927, the Soviet Union celebrated the fiftieth year of Vladimir Leonidovich Durov’s (1863–1934) remarkable career. Eighty-seven years later, Russia proudly recognized the continuation of his work by marking the half-century jubilee of his great-granddaughter Nataliia Iur’evna Durova in 2004. As descendants of a long line of state servitors (including the noted “cavalry maiden” of the Napoleonic Wars, Nadezhda Durova1 ), Vladimir and his brother Anatolii (1865–1916) set the clan on a new path to fame when they ran away from cadet school to join the circus. As they toured the Russian provinces and Europe, first working for others and later heading independent troupes, the Durov brothers became famous as satiric clowns. Beginning in 1882, their animal acts ridiculed bureaucracy and pomposity, frequently getting them into trouble with authorities at home and abroad. Often mistaken for each other by audiences and in the press, the brothers competed strenuously to become THE Durov.2 Gradually, they followed separate career paths. Using relatively simple animal acts as part of his performance , Anatolii focused on his role as a clown while Vladimir continued to appear as a clown in the arena throughout his life but intensified and expanded his work with his animals, developing dramatic scenarios. In 1912, a large house on Staraia Bozhedomka in Moscow became a residence for his family and animal associates (land, sea, and air all represented) and a museum, educational center, and training arena that soon was called “Durov ’s Corner.”3 9H AlegACyOfkindness V. L. Durov’s Revolutionary Approach to Animal Training ann kleimola costlow nelson text4.indd 164 6/23/10 8:40 AM A legACy Of kindness————165 Durov’s work with his animals interested leading Russian scientists in the areas of physiology and psychology, including Vladimir M. Bekhterev, founder of reflexology. After the 1917 Revolution, Durov’s Corner became a forum for studying animal behavior and intelligence. Inspired by his laboratory work with scientists, Vladimir Durov in 1924 published a “scholarly-popular” account of his training method entitled Animal Training (Dressirovka zhivotnykh).4 Identifying himself as a “self-taught” trainer (samouchka), whose ideas had evolved principally through preparing his animals for the public arena, he published the training techniques he had developed over forty years of practical experience. Durov based his philosophy upon his insistence that human beings were merely one of many species in the animal kingdom. This belief dated back to an epiphany experienced during his cadet school days. He and his classmates had been very fond of a little dog whom the master replaced with another, and the boys drew lots to select the “executioner” of the newcomer . Durov “won” the task and “treacherously,” as he later wrote, threw a noose around its neck, and led the trusting animal to a shed. Compelled by the “honor of the uniform,” Durov tried to carry out the task but fainted before he could. Afterwards he saw the dog’s sad eyes everywhere. When he eventually learned that the “condemned” animal had survived, he was greatly relieved, and that event completely changed his attitude toward every animal. “From that moment,” he said, “I understood that animals, just like humans, love, suffer, are happy, and enjoy life. I understood that they have the same right to life that we have.”5 While the incident may have taken on larger symbolic significance in retrospect, Durov’s respect for animals underlay both his training and his educational efforts. He tried to widen others’ understanding of animals by reframing an old proverb, “Everyone goes crazy in his own way,” into “Every animal is intelligent in its own way.”6 Therefore, he was convinced that successful training rested on a relationship of trust and understanding that grew only from sharing life experiences, a view echoed more than eighty years later by his great-granddaughter, whose animals all carry the “patronymic” “Natal’evich” and whom she categorizes as “partners with equal rights, colleagues, with whom there must be harmony.”7 Durov also believed that humans and other animals could communicate, although he recognized the depth of what he called the problem of “mutual misunderstanding ,” a formulation that foreshadows Jean Donaldson’s recent discussion of the “culture clash” between man and beast.8 Following Durov’s approach, any would-be trainer needed to study the individual characteristics of the animal, its environment, its “upbringing” in nature or by other humans, and its hereditary instincts (for example, costlow nelson text4.indd 165 6/23/10...

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