t."

"Just the same, to dig a dainty out of your pocket once in a while and
give an animal a nibble, always makes a hit with the audience. That's
about all it's good for, yet it's a good stunt. Audiences like to
believe that the animals enjoy doing their tricks, and that they are
treated like pampered darlings, and that they just love their masters to
death. But God help all of us and our meal tickets if the audiences
could see behind the scenes. Every trained-animal turn would be taken
off the stage instanter, and we'd be all hunting for a job."

"Yes, and there's rough stuff no end pulled off on the stage right before
the audience's eyes. The best fooler I ever saw was Lottie's. She had a
bunch of trained cats. She loved them to death right before everybody,
especially if a trick wasn't going good. What'd she do? She'd take that
cat right up in her arms and kiss it. And when she put it down it'd
perform the trick all right all right, while the audience applauded its
silly head off for the kindness and humaneness she'd shown. Kiss it? Did
she? I'll tell you what she did. She bit its nose."

"Eleanor Pavalo learned the trick from Lottie, and used it herself on her
toy dogs. And many a dog works on the stage in a spiked collar, and a
clever man can twist a dog's nose and nobody in the audience any the
wiser. But it's the fear that counts. It's what the dog knows he'll get
afterward when the turn's over that keeps most of them straight."

"Remember Captain Roberts and his great Danes. They weren't pure-breds,
though. He must have had a dozen of them--toughest bunch of brutes I
ever saw. He boarded them here twice. You couldn't go among them
without a club in your hand. I had a Mexican lad laid up by them. He
was a tough one, too. But they got him down and nearly ate him. The
doctors took over forty stitches in him and shot him full of that Pasteur
dope for hydrophobia. And he always will limp with his right leg from
what the dogs did to him. I tell you, they were the limit. And yet,
every time the curtain went up, Captain Roberts brought the house down
with the first stunt. Those dogs just flocked all over him, loving him
to death, from the looks of it. And were they loving him? They hated
him. I've seen him, right here in the cage at Cedarwild, wade into them
with a club and whale the stuffing impartially out of all of them. Sure,
they loved him not. Just a bit of the same old aniseed