Читать книгу Diet for a New America 25th Anniversary Edition - John Robbins - Страница 22

All animals—including those we have been taught to fear—can respond to love and give it. Nowhere has this been proven more profoundly than by Ralph Helfer and his wife, Toni, two of Hollywood’s foremost wild-animal trainers. Helfer operates an animal park and training center in Buena Vista, California, where he handles and trains the fiercest of animals. Conventional wisdom has it that training these wild animals for show business requires instilling fear in the creatures and breaking their will. But Helfer is successful with a radically different approach. He says the idea first came to him in a hospital bed:

Violence begets violence, I mused, as I lay in my hospital bed 25 years ago after being mauled by a 500-pound lion. The big cat had been “fear-trained,” with whips, chairs, and screams, as animals in captivity traditionally are; and though he performed his tricks well enough, he had no love for humans. Just as a battered child grows up to be a child abuser, a battered animal awaits its chance to do unto others as has been done unto him. I had been done unto royally by that lion, and I had plenty of time during a long convalescence to figure out why. That lion had attacked me, as so many other animals have attacked humans over the centuries, not because he was “wild,” but because he was unloved. Your dog or cat is no different, nor is your horse or fish or pig or bird.

The idea of affection-training was born in that hospital bed. Animals respond to their lives emotionally, I reasoned. If an animal could be trained by addressing its negative emotions (with threats and punishment), he could probably also be trained by appealing to his positive emotions. Surely the results would be even better with love than with pain, for the animal would be motivated to cooperate. Where pain might get the horse to water, love could induce him to drink.

Since that time, I’ve proved my theory with almost every animal known to man. I’ve traveled from the jungles of Africa to the forests of India, working with everything from hippopotami to tarantulas.27

When I first heard of training wild animals through affection, I was skeptical. But Helfer’s success record, “with everything from hippopotami to tarantulas,” is hard to discount. His animals have been used in many television shows, movies, and commercials. There is one thing, however, that affection-training cannot accomplish.

There are some circus tricks that animals can be forced to perform through threats and fear but that they cannot be coaxed to perform through positive means. The reason for this is simple: the tricks we see in circus rings are often in violation of the anatomical structure and deepest instincts of the animals. Horses dancing on their hind feet, bears roller-skating, dogs walking on their back legs and pushing prams, cats firing off cannons, tigers jumping through burning hoops. These are displays, not of the magnificent natural capacities of the animals, but of their degrading obedience to the dominance of their trainers, a dominance achieved in the ugliest of ways. The quickest and least expensive method of breaking the spirits of the animals held prisoner by the circus trainers is by using whips, electric shocks, sharp hooks, loud noises, and starvation. The training is done in seclusion, and if local SPCAs get too nosey about what is being done to the animals to force their compliance, the animals are moved to foreign countries where there are no restrictions on animal treatment.

One elephant, trained to dance and to play “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby” on the harmonica, was described recently as being probably the meanest elephant in the United States. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had good reason.