Animals that formerly had to go around
in the woods, hungry half the time and occasionally gorging themselves
on a dead animal and sleeping out in the rain in all kinds of weather,
know when they have struck a good thing in a menagerie, with clean straw
to sleep in, and when they are hungry all they have to do is to sound
their bugle and they have pre-digested beefsteak and breakfast food
brought to them on a silver platter, and if the food is not to their
liking they set up a kick like a star boarder at a boarding house. Their
condition in the show, in its changed condition from that of their
native haunts, is like taking a hobo off the trucks of a freight train
and taking him to the dining car of the limited, and letting him eat to
a finish. People talk about animals escaping from captivity, and going
back to the jungles and humane societies shed tears over the poor,
sad-eyed captives, sighing for their homes, but you turn them loose at
South Bend, and run your circus train to New Albany without them and
they would follow the train and overtake it before the evening
performance the next day, and you would find them trying to break into
their cages again, and they would have to be fed.
When pa and I went into the barn where the cages were, to take an
account of stock, and get acquainted with our animals, they acted just
like the circus men did when they saw pa's clothes.
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