India,—land of waning wonders,—has a great name for the training of animals, a pursuit in which the people are popularly believed to attain marvellous success by reason of special aptitudes and faculties. In the yellow-backed romances of the boulevard Orientalism in which the French indulge, Indian princes and princesses are habitually attended by trained leopards and tigers, while English writers dwell on the skill of the trainers. But seen from near and compared with what has been done and is now done in other countries, the wonder pales a little. Nothing half so squarely attempted and completely accomplished as the modern European and American training of wild beasts in performances foreign to their nature and habits has ever been thought of in India. It should be noted, to begin with, that only persons of low caste ever engage in this pursuit, which demands peculiar qualities of hand, will, and temper, and cannot be learned as easily as wood-sawing. These people have a wonderful knowledge of woodcraft, and are fearless with the creatures they know so well. They can catch and tame, but, at the risk of falling into the pestilent error of hair-splitting, I venture to discriminate between taming and training. The first is the most important part but not nearly the whole of the latter, and it is the first only which is well done.

But as to training as indicated, for example, in the deservedly popular works of the late Rev. J. G. Wood, it may be worth while to look a little nearer. This authority wrote that "in India trained otters are almost as common as trained dogs." But they are not used throughout Hindustan, nor in Central India, nor in the Punjab, where they are found in great numbers, and in the regions where they help in fishing they are never seen out of the hands of their owners, obscure river-side tribes. They are only employed in the back waters of Cochin, in part of Bengal, and on the Indus river. All that we see of the otter in Britain is a poor little beast desperately fighting for its life against murderous crowds of dogs and men; but in reality there are few animals of more amiability, talent, and docility. A Scottish gamekeeper once trained one to go with dogs, and used to say it was the best cur in the pack. They are effectually tamed in India, which is an easy matter, and they practise for the benefit of the fisherman the art to which they are ordained by nature. The cormorant and the pelican are also used by the Indus boatmen as in China for fishing. The pelican, though furnished by nature with the finest game-bag or creel ever carried by angler, is inferior to the cormorant (Graculus carbo) as a fisherman. Both these birds, like the otter, fish by nature, nor could Buckland or Cholmondeley-Pennell teach them a turn of their craft. It is certainly interesting to see the hooded cormorants on the fishermen's house-boats and the otters tethered to stakes near, playing with the no less amphibious children and behaving like the playful, intelligent water-cats they are. But both this sight and the knowledge that they are used in this wise are distinctly uncommon and out of the range of the people of India at large.

The same writer also descants on the great powers of Orientals in training the cheetah or hunting leopard (Felis jubata). In this instance the only point where real skill comes into play is in the first capture of the adult animal, when it has already learned the swift bounding onset,—its one accomplishment. The young cheetah is not worth catching, for it has not learned its trade, nor can it be taught in captivity! The Christian Missionary is occasionally asked to state exactly how he proposes to convert the heathen man, and he sensibly concludes, as a rule, to begin with the child. The problem of how to catch uninjured so powerful and active a beast as the hunting leopard seems as difficult as the conversion of the heathen adult. In practice, however, it is simple. There are certain trees where these great dog-cats (for they have some oddly canine characteristics) come to play and whet their claws. The hunters find such a tree, arrange deer-sinew nooses round it, and await the event. The animal comes and is caught by a leg, and it is at this point the trouble begins. It is no small achievement for two or three naked, ill-fed men to secure so fierce a captive and carry him home on a cart. Then his training commences. He is tied in all directions, principally from a thick grummet of rope round his loins, while a hood fitted over his head effectually blinds him. He is fastened on a strong cot bedstead, and the keepers and their wives and families reduce him to submission by starving him and keeping him awake. His head is made to face the village street, and for an hour at a time several times a day his keepers make pretended rushes at him and wave cloths, staves, and other articles in his face. He is talked to continually, and women's tongues are believed to be the most effective anti-soporifics. No created being could resist the effects of hunger, want of sleep, and feminine scolding, and the poor cheetah becomes piteously, abjectly tame. He is taken out for a walk, occasionally, if a slow crawl between four attendants, all holding hard, can be called a walk, and his promenades are always through the most crowded bazaars, where the keepers' friends are to be found. The street dog snarls and growls from a safe distance at the little procession, and occasionally a child, suddenly catching sight of the strange beast, breaks into a frightened cry; but the people on the whole are rather pleased than otherwise to see the Raja's cheetahs among them.

It is difficult to give a just idea of the curious intimacy with animals that exists in India among those who have charge of them. The cheetah's bedstead is like that of the keeper, and when the creature is tamed, leopard and man are often curled under the same blanket. When his bedfellow is restless, the keeper lazily stretches out an arm from his end of the cot and dangles a tassel over the animal's head, which seems to soothe him. In the early morning I have seen a cheetah sitting up on his couch, a red blanket half-covering him, his tasselled red hood pushed awry, looking exactly like an elderly gentleman in a night-cap as he yawned with the irresolute air of one who is in doubt whether he will rise or turn in for yet another nap. Of actual training in the field there is little or none. So it is not wonderful that the cheetah loses its natural dash and is often left behind by the antelope. At the wedding festivities of a Punjab chief the other day (March 1886) the guests were shown this sport, and the cheetah caught and killed a black-buck. But it was found that the Raja's servants, by way of making quite sure, had first hamstrung the poor antelope!

The ordained procedure is that the hooded leopard is taken afield on a cart driven near a herd of black-buck, shown the game, and slipped. In a few bounds he reaches and seizes it, is rewarded with a draught of blood, or a morsel of liver in a wooden spoon, and put on his cart again; but there is a large proportion of failures. And the creature is not practising a feat he has been taught, but is merely let loose to perform an act he learned in a wild state, which his keepers cannot teach, and for which, in fact, their teaching seems to unfit him. I fail, therefore, to see where the "wonderfully perfect training" of which the Rev. J. G. Wood speaks comes in.

In some hunting pictures by Indian artists, the cart that bears the cheetah and his keeper is drawn by a pair of black-buck antelopes, and you often hear of the Nilghai also being trained to the yoke for Indian Princes. Nay, there are Englishmen who have tried to harness these fine animals to the buggy and the dog-cart. But though confidently reported, you may go far before meeting with an authentic case of successful antelope-harnessing. An Oriental hears vaguely of things of this nature, and promptly accepts them as common and indubitable facts. In official life, speaking with Europeans, he is learning to say, "I have heard," but in private he is as cock-sure as a London literary man who has found a fallacy repeated in five books.

Still less capacity is shown in the training of animals for street performances. The bear, the monkey, the goat, and sometimes the bull, are led abroad to fairs by men of low caste. The gray bear (Ursus isabellinus) and the common black bear (Ursus labiatus) are most docile creatures, and would repay good teaching. But the bear-leader is a man of few and chance-hap meals, and though starvation and the stick make his creatures gentle enough, he has not the wit to teach them well. Some bear-leaders buckle a leather apron round their bodies and, thus protected, pretend to wrestle with the poor beast; but a paralytic dance on his hind legs, cadenced by jerks on his chain and blows with the staff, is the usual depressing performance. No more complete picture of misery can be imagined than that presented by a dancing bear on a hot day in a town in the Plains, where there is no escape from the pitiless sun.

A goat and two or three monkeys are the actors in a little play that goes on unceasingly all over India. Their leader is a picturesque tatterdemalion who wanders far in search of audiences and is suspected of picking up more than alms. The goat kneels as a salaam; sometimes he stands with all four feet carefully adjusted on a pile of hour-glass-shaped blocks of wood, and he serves as charger to the monkeys, who put on caps and coats and are jerked to and fro by their chains in a sort of dance, their hungry eyes intently watching the crowd for something to eat. They are Rajas going to court, they are Lord Generals-in-Chief going to fight, they are champions and swordsmen; and they do everything with sad indifference to the accompaniment of a droning mechanical patter intoned with an air of profound boredom. While confessing that this performance always makes me melancholy, I must admit that children, for whom it is intended, and who ought to be good judges, are delighted by it. To some generations of Anglo-Indian children as well as countless hosts of native little ones it has given a vast amount of gratification.

Dogs are so entirely neglected that the ordinary fetch-and-carry tricks of an English spaniel or retriever are looked at with astonishment, and you are listened to with polite incredulity when you describe the performances of a good collie with sheep.

I have mentioned the elephant in another place, but while cordially acknowledging that Indian mahouts have a complete and most intimate mastery and knowledge of their own peculiar beast, I would point out that it is naturally docile and gentle, and that American and English circus trainers make the creature do more than the most skilful mahout has taught.

It is seldom in Northern India that the bulls led about by the quasi-religious mendicants known as "Anandi" do more than shake their heads or kneel at a sign of command. With a clever boniment or patter even this much might be made entertaining, but the patter is seldom clever. In Southern India a bull and a cow are sometimes made to enact a quarrel and a reconciliation, but there is not a showman in Europe who would consider the animals taught to any purpose. So little contents an audience of rustic Indian folk, and when you call your bull Rama, and your cow Sita, and they are, to begin with, sacred and most cherished objects, there is obviously no need for elaborate performances.

As to horses, they are not so much trained as constrained, with the often cruel constraint of a timorous hand. No animal throughout India is brought to that wonderful pitch of education shown by the horses employed in railway shunting yards in England, where trains are made up. At a word these fine animals put forth a measured strength to set a carriage in motion, at a gesture they stop or turn; they seem to know the intricate points of the rails as well as the signalman; and, their service done, they take up of themselves their own place in the labyrinth of iron, standing unmoved while the locomotives go roaring and screaming past.

No, the Oriental is not a first-rate animal trainer. With almost boundless patience, he has no steadfastness of aim, nor has he sufficient firmness of hand and will to secure confidence and obedience.

Yet, while the art of training may not be very thoroughly understood, the tribes which have to do with jungle life are often wonderful trackers and highly skilled in woodcraft. Many English sportsmen in their talk, and some sporting writers in their books, fail to do justice to the courage and skill of the unarmed assistants on whom they depend for success. There are many chases in which the honours ought to go to the bold and patient trackers who mark down the game day after day, and manage to drive it up to the guns of the well-fed English gentlemen, waiting serene and safe with a battery of the best weapons London gunsmiths can provide. This mistake in taste and judgment is not made by such masters as Sir S. Baker and Mr. Sanderson, who show a friendly sympathy with their assistants.