Zamba Read online

  I slowly built my collection to include raccoons, various monkeys, deer, hawks, and an impressive variety of snakes, and we were getting more and more work from the studios. I was beginning to experiment with my own self-taught methods of training them. I never used violence or deprivation or any other of the cruelty-based methods I would later learn were standard with other trainers. It simply never occurred to me.

  6

  Though I was happy running Nature’s Haven, I found that I was still powerfully drawn to the big exotic animals. During that time, I often traveled to Thousand Oaks, a city near Los Angeles and home to the world-famous Jungleland.

  Most of the animals used in the film industry and circus world were kept there, and it gave me my first exposure to the big exotics. Jungleland had started out as the World Jungle Compound, owned and operated by Louis Gobel. It was later sold to Roy Cabot, who changed the name to Jungleland and opened it to the public.

  I wanted desperately to know how these animals were trained, so I volunteered to help the keepers maintain their charges. Sometimes I was allowed to help the trainers unload the animals when they were coming back from a studio job. In the end, most of what I learned was what not to do.

  In those days, training through violence and coercion was the norm. There were no regulatory bodies like the ASPCA monitoring how working animals were trained and kept. The trainers used force to dominate the animals, and the terrified animals became even more violent in response. It was a vicious circle, one that was dangerous for both the humans and the animals involved.

  Different trainers called their methods by different names, but it all boiled down to the same thing: a combination of reward and fear. If the trainers relied only on a reward to get the animal to perform, they would run into trouble when the animal’s tummy was full. Since the studios lost tens of thousands of dollars a day when the animals didn’t perform, the trainers were made acutely aware of how important it was for the animals to do their stunts when and how they were told to do them. So the policy was “do it—or else.”

  Violence was rampant, and always just out of sight. Animals were tied in inconspicuous places and beaten until they submitted to the trainer’s wishes. Chimps were taken out of sight into the toilet “to teach them a lesson.” The beatings were done so that they didn’t leave bruises—at least any that would show on camera.

  But it was at Jungleland that I met Mabel Stark. Mabel was the only woman who worked big cats in the arena in North America. She had been working big cats for most of her life, and when I knew her, she was in her late seventies. Still, she gave a performance six days a week with her ten Bengal tigers. Her training method was many years ahead of its time, and it made an enormous impression on me.

  Mabel was different from the other trainers. In content, sure, her act was similar to many of the others. The cats did rollovers, sit-ups, snarls, and all the standard routines. The difference was that she treated them affectionately, hugging and talking with them. Instead of cowering in fear or raging, her cats always seemed to enjoy what they were doing. Mabel never used a weapon; she carried nothing but a short stick, which she never raised in anger. If one of the cats made an error—went to the wrong pedestal, for instance, or refused to jump a barrel—she would simply “spank” him with a touch from her little stick on his nose.

  “Naughty, naughty! Now you just go back there and do it right.”

  She didn’t care if her schoolmistress routine interrupted her act. Her cats came first—and that meant their training took precedence over other people’s entertainment.

  Her devotion to those cats extended outside the ring as well. She never allowed anybody else to take care of her animals, personally handling all their feeding and cleaning and care. If one of her cats got sick, she would stay with him, sleeping just outside his cage and tending to him at all hours of the night, for as long as it took for him to recover.

  “Why, half the training is caring for them,” she would say.

  Mabel was one of those people who are much better with animals than they are with people. The affection she lavished on those tigers didn’t extend to the humans around her, and while she never spoke a harsh word to her cats, she was a loner, and her abrupt manner with people put them off. This didn’t help her already rocky relationships with many of her colleagues, who had a lot of ego invested in believing that taming lions and tigers was a macho man’s job. The fact that Mabel, a little old lady, was able to train her cats with affection and love instead of with threats and violence made the job look too easy.

  One fateful day, a call came down from the office. “Sorry, Mabel, but we have to let you go. The insurance company won’t let you work. You’re just getting too advanced in years.”

  Mabel may have been elderly, but there was far more risk in acts that used the whip, the chair, and the gun. Mabel’s cats loved her, and you never felt that she was in special danger because of her age or size when you were watching her in the ring. Mabel had her own theory: there had been rumors, spread by her jealous competitors, that she wanted to die in the arena, and she believed that this gossip had gotten back to the insurance company. “It’s not true,” she insisted. “Why would I put that on my lovely cats?”

  But the owner had made up his mind, and Mabel’s fate was sealed. She asked one last question: “What will happen to my babies?”

  Nobody had ever worked with her cats before, and it wasn’t clear that they would transfer to another trainer without problems. The owner hesitated. “We’ll have to give them to Stroker to break, I guess. We have too much money in them to let them sit idle.”

  Stroker was known as a great arena trainer, and it was true: his performances were spectacular, and always popular with the public. What the public didn’t know was that he would do anything necessary to get his cats to obey him. His methods were brutal and unforgiving.

  Stroker had unknowingly provided my own introduction to “fear training” on one of my early visits to Jungleland. Exploring early on a Saturday morning, I’d found a large old barn standing in the middle of a clearing, far away from the public areas of the park. Inside, I saw a temporary steel arena, the kind set up at fairs, studios, and carnivals for a day or week.

  Stroker stood in the middle of the ring holding a long pole. With him was a half-grown Bengal tiger. She was foaming at the mouth and breathing heavily. A thick chain was tied to a post outside the ring and ran though the bars to a collar around the cat’s neck.

  Each time he approached the cat, she would snarl and leap for him, and the chain would catch her entire body weight, cruelly snapping her back. And each time she went for him, Stroker would bring the pole down hard, cracking the cat across her body. Large welts appeared on her sleek fur. Stroker was yelling at the tiger in German the whole time. I later found out that he had been attacked years before by a big cat who had knocked him headfirst into one of the heavy steel pedestals in the ring, smashing his head and causing permanent hearing loss. He refused to wear a hearing aid because of his ego, so everything he said was at top volume.

  I recognized the tiger. A few big cats, lions and tigers, had recently arrived at the park from overseas. They were all half-grown and had come directly either from the wild or from zoos. In either case, they were petrified of their new surroundings. It was Stroker’s job to “break them”—to break their spirit, and put the fear of mankind into their hearts so they would do whatever their trainer asked of them in the future.

  The tiger tried over and over to attack the man who was provoking her, but she finally realized that it was useless. Exhausted and demoralized, with the raised weals on her sides and back angry and bleeding, the cat finally started to back away from the pole. When he could no longer antagonize her, Stroker knew he had won. He had a veterinarian tranquilize her and remove the chain.

  He then set barrels around the arena. When the effects of the tranquilizer wore off, the cat ran from Stroker. To get away from him and the threat of his violence, she ha
d to jump the barrels. He used the whip and pole to guide her and keep her on the move.

  The arena was round, so Stroker couldn’t be cornered. A chair was kept nearby, in case the cat decided to go for him. The four legs of a chair would confuse her until the pole or whip—or if necessary, the gun—could come into play.

  This “breaking of the spirit” was the fate awaiting Mabel’s lovingly trained tigers, and it was a future that Mabel couldn’t face. The idea of her beloved cats in the hands of this monster was too much, but there was nothing she could do. That night, she went home, wrote a note to a friend, put a plastic bag over her head, and died in the most honorable way she could.

  I will certainly never forget her, and I have heard other trainers who were young at that time say the same thing. She was the first woman I ever saw working with big cats in an arena, and her nonviolent, affectionate technique was an inspiration for what came to be my own philosophy of animal training, one that I would expand into movie studio work. I didn’t necessarily use her methods, but I was inspired by them. Eventually I would prove that my technique allowed me to do everything that fear training did, and more.

  7

  When Zamba came into my life, I was beginning to refine the idea of affection training. I decided that I would use this new system to raise him.

  My animal training peers had told me that I was flirting with danger, and that I would surely be mauled or killed when he grew out of cubhood. But I had already seen (and experienced firsthand) the results of fear-based training, and I had no intention of raising a lion that way. Deep in my gut, and with every fiber of my being, I knew it was wrong.

  Men have pitted their strength against animals since time began. In many cases, their success in that battle was key to their survival. But there has always been a dark underbelly to that contest: man’s desire to cause pain and death in animals, and to witness acts of cruelty against them.

  Think, for instance, of the Roman gladiators. In the Colosseum, an amphitheater that could seat more than fifty thousand spectators, animals were forced to battle other animals to entertain the crowds. The arena was designed with a maze of passageways beneath the stage floor, complete with temporary holding pens for the animals, and a hand-operated elevator to convey them to the arena.

  To feed the public’s appetite for spectacle, North Africa, Europe, Asia and other areas were systematically stripped of their exotic animals. Many died as a result of the way they were captured; others suffered the long, arduous journey back to Rome, only to be killed by another animal in the ring. Unspeakable combinations of animals were thrown together to fight to the death and please the crowds—lions were put with bulls, tigers with bears. It was a tremendous success.

  The emperor Nero introduced humans into the “sport.” It is said that the emperor, witnessing a small carnival performance, was delighted to see the enthusiastic spectator reaction when a performer was attacked by one of the animals. Slaves, or those who opposed Nero politically, were brought to the arena and thrown to the carnivores—leopards, hyenas, tigers, and lions—to be killed, and in some cases eaten. They would tie elephants to each of a man’s limbs, and then beat the elephants so they’d move, ripping the person to pieces. The nearby Circus Maximus became a proving ground for up-and-coming gladiators, men who sought to distinguish themselves in the eyes of the emperor and to win his favor by fighting men or animals.

  In a way, I feel that the circus arena of today is but a smaller version of the Colosseum. It is still a demonstration of the contest between man and animal. Of course, nobody goes to the circus to see animals kill one another, or to see them kill a man.

  Or do they?

  I have spent much time talking to people who frequent circuses, and many will admit that they watch the arena not just to see the skills of the trainer and the beauty of the great beasts performing, but in the hope that there will be an attack.

  You were quite a bit more likely to see an animal attack a human in the days before nonviolent training methods became the norm. It’s no secret: frightened, abused animals are violent animals. So the situation created by the prevalence of fear training in the industry was dangerous, not only for the animals, but also for the trainers.

  Because the conditions were so treacherous, many of the trainers drank just to get the courage to enter the arena. One well-known trainer had three glasses of booze lined up just out of sight of the public. He downed one just before he went into the ring, another halfway through just before his big number, and finally a third at the end—his reward for making it, I guess.

  Many of the trainers I met during that time were maimed, losing fingers, hands, even arms. We heard about new and serious injuries—even deaths—every month. It always amazed me to see how proud the trainers were of their injuries. They were ready, even anxious, to show anyone who asked their claw marks and bites.

  “Ya see this one?” asked Bruno, a star arena professional who called himself Catman in the ring. A large man with bulging biceps and shaved head, he rolled up his pants to reveal a huge hole where a fang had entered his calf, ripping out most of the tendons and muscle.

  “That big Siberian over there.” He pointed. “Ruby’s her name. She’s the one who got me. Just that quick she was, and she had me.” I noticed a number of old scars on his arms and a massive one showing through his sparse arena costume that arched clear across his back. He continued, “But now that I’m back, I’ll show her who’s boss.” Then he added, “Even if it means doing her in.”

  I saw many trainers like Bruno during the forty years that I worked in the motion picture and television industry. I personally believe a good trainer shouldn’t have any bites or claw marks. I’ve been asked over the years to show my scars as though they were badges of honor, and I’m proud to say I have only a few—and most of them are from climbing through barbed wire ranch fences. Bruno would have called me a coward.

  But I believe in the yin and yang of life, that all things have an equal opposite, like love and fear. I believe that these emotions are merely different sides of the same energy. It was my belief that I could use positive energy, or love, to overcome any negative energy—fear or hate. Every living being needs love, and it is through love that we learn. All the existing training systems used fear, but it didn’t make sense to me. I recognized immediately that the single most important element was to establish a form of communication between the human and the animal. How could any real communication be possible between two parties when one was made to be afraid of the other?

  I felt sure that a gentle, emotion-based path was the key to reaching the inner world of an animal. I knew the animal would understand and accept the affection I gave it, and it had always been my experience that a desire to please goes hand and hand with affection. Just because an animal is physically stronger than a human, and is accustomed to using that strength to achieve its desires, didn’t mean that it couldn’t be taught a different way.

  I also believed then, as I do now, that effective communication between man and animals is the key to a better relationship with the whole earth. If you could truly get in touch with all that is awesome and powerful about nature through a relationship with an animal, would you still pollute the environment? Of course you wouldn’t. My hope was that some day my affection-based system would become the universal language between man and animal.

  Determining how to do this was a little more complicated. How does one say no to an animal as big and dangerous as a lion without physically instilling fear? Could there be respect without needing to resort to violence?

  According to my philosophy, if there was to be a reprimand, it would have to be an emotional one and not a physical one. If there is love between two individuals, then the greatest pain is to emotionally “hurt,” or upset, the other. Anyone who has ever raised a child knows that communicating disappointment is a far more effective way of exercising discipline than any threat or coercion could ever be. Because the child cares about your opinion
of him, your disappointment motivates him to do better the next time.

  To train animals without using physical pain, I would have to establish a loving relationship with that animal, and then find a way to cause emotional “pain” to deliver a reprimand.

  In itself, this is a dangerous game. If the animal doesn’t have affection for you, its feelings will not be hurt by a reprimand. If you hurt the animal’s feelings in the wrong way, or too acutely, or if your timing is off, you run the risk of confusing the animal, and being misunderstood. Any misunderstanding with a large, potentially dangerous animal is to be avoided, especially since accidentally causing anger can be a life-threatening situation.

  As I had learned in my early days at Jungleland, many of the people who got into animal training had difficulty in showing any kindness or love to their animals. Most of them were men, and the kind of men who felt that loving an animal and showing it affection would make them sissies. Luckily I had no such hang-ups. Affection came easily to me as soon as I was in the presence of an animal, and I grew increasingly convinced, after years of studying other training procedures, that affection and emotional control could be the basis for an extremely effective and cruelty-free animal training system.

  Once you have an emotional bond with an animal, it’s a very powerful tie, and not one to be abused or treated lightly. I learned this lesson once, the hard way. It was late in Zamba’s life, after we had happily been working together for many years, and I made a terrible and tragic mistake, one that violated his trust. The director of the movie we were working on needed him to “die” on camera. The scene was to be a close-up. How do you train a lion to convincingly act a death scene? I knew of only one way to hurt his feelings. So I yelled at him. “What are you doing, you dumb animal? I can’t believe you did that! Bad lion! Stupid Zamba!”