Stuff You Should Know - How Lion Taming Works

Episode Date: October 18, 2012

Bossing a lion around in front of a crowd at a circus has been an attraction for 200 years, but exactly how lion tamers get their captive wild animals to comply has evolved over time. Take a peek in the jaws of this odd profession with Josh and Chuck. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. All right. This is Stuff You Should Know. Yeah. This, Josh, is another episode of the Summer of Sam. Oh, this kid is good. Yeah. Our friend Sam T. Garden is programming our show here and there.

Hey, Sam. And Samson and How Lion Taming Works, which is also written by Debbie Ronca, my buddy. Yeah. From New Jersey. Yep. Roller Derby Debbie, as I call her. Don't call her that. No, you don't. I call her Deb. She's my old friend. If I call her Roller Derby Debbie. You did it primarily the first time. Yeah. Roller Derby Debbie. That would just get difficult. Sure. Yeah. Well, right on. This one's just going to be great then, because it was a good article, too. That's right. And you can read Debbie's awesome blog at FreakGirl.com. That's quite a plug. Thank you. And then where are we at with Sam? So Sam has now selected How Lion Taming Works. What was the first one? I can't remember. It was a couple of weeks ago.

He's done two. Man, it was awesome. But we actually recorded a couple that he had not heard yet that he also had on his list. Oh, good. Just by chance. Are we going to attribute those to him? No. Just the ones that we saw afterward. But anyway, thanks, Sam. This is a good one. Well put, Chuck. Thank you. Well, let's see. I have a bit of an intro. Have you ever heard the idea that the Simpsons have a tendency to predict the future? No. Okay. Well, let me enlighten you. All right. There was an episode called Homer HOMR, Season 12, Episode 9. Excellent episode. It's where Homer basically, they find out that Homer is a crayons stuck in his brain. A what? A crayon? A crayon. Yeah, I remember. From childhood. Yeah.

And they remove it and his IQ just immediately doubles. Classic. In 2007, years after Homer, a German lady, age 59, was going to get surgery to cure her chronic headaches. They found a pencil that was stuck up there from childhood. Did she stuck up there? Yeah. Wow. When she was a kid and apparently forgot. They found they removed the pencil. She's fine. People are wacky. Yeah. But isn't that weird? Yeah, sure. Okay. Here's another one. Let me see what you think about this. Homer in the Treehouse of Horror 19. Oh, definitely didn't see that one. Really? I quit watching it after a certain amount. That's season 20. Okay. He goes to vote for Obama on election day and the, well, it's a takeoff of Diebold, the voting machines. Yeah. That had

so many problems. Yeah, yeah. He goes to vote for Obama and instead, it starts voting a bunch of times for McCain. Okay. So the next, I guess that year, a woman from West Virginia said that she checked the box next to Obama and it just automatically switched over to McCain. Really? This is after this thing came out. Okay. Which would mean it's predicting. Probably most chilling is, comes from Springfield with the S spelled as a dollar sign. The subtitle is, or how I learned to stop worrying and love legalized gambling. Season five, episode 10, Springfield gets a casino. I remember this one. Mr. Burns Casino, great one. Yeah. And in it are two characters who are obviously based on Siegfried and Roy. Yeah. And they're with their white

tiger Anastasia. Yeah. She loves the city. Yeah. Yeah. And Anastasia flashes back to when she was caught in the wild by Siegfried and Roy who shot her with a tranquilizer gun and spits out her little bubble pipe and her little beanie and attacks one of them. Yeah. This is a full 10 years before the attack of Roy Horan in 2003 during a show at the Mirage in Las Vegas where one of their white tigers attacked him, Montecor, attacked Roy. That's right. And basically just ended their career right then. Yeah. I think on that one, like if you're going to write a Simpsons episode aping Siegfried and Roy, what else are they going to do? You're going to have the lion eat them. Okay. Or the tiger, I'm sorry. You raised an excellent point here, Chuck. But it's still

remarkable. It is. But you raised a very good point. And the point is I think everybody who sees someone interacting with the tamest wild animal you could possibly imagine still will not be surprised if that animal kills the person. Yeah. Because as Jack Hannah put it, very appropriately, I think in Jack Hannah, he was the original Steve Irwin, right? Yeah, sure. He said, you can train a wild animal, but you could never tame a wild animal. And that's a really big important point in the world of, I guess, lion taming. Yeah. And another famous lion trainer slash tamer, we're going to probably interchange those words, said you can't tame a lion because if you did, there would be no act. Yeah, okay. Part of the act and part of the

thrill of this for people is the fact that these are wild beasts. And if it was just a penguin, right, wouldn't be very exciting. No, it wouldn't. Although I'd like to see that. A trained penguin? Well, yeah, putting your mouth in it, head in its mouth and cracking the whip. That'd be fun. Yeah, it would be. It would be really mind-blowing if the penguin was dressed like a lion tamer and you were treating it like a lion. Okay, I've got another lion tamer quote for you then, smart guy. All right. Goonther Gable Williams. Yeah, he was the one I saw growing up. Okay. At the Ringling Brothers. He said a wild animal is like a loaded gun. It can go off at any time. So let's end the intro with that. Okay. Let's talk about lion taming. You brought up a really

good point, Chuck. If you are in this world these days, it's not lion tamer, it's lion trainer. Yeah. Or wild animal trainer. Yes. Because none of these people think that they have a tame animal on their hands. No, it's sort of the hubris of some of these early jerks that we'll talk about right now. 1819 was kind of when it all got going. Yeah. Frenchman named Henri Martin. Yeah, hey to our French listener. He was a retired horse trainer and he thought, you know what, I'm going to try and work with a tiger, which is very different than what anyone's ever seen before. And he had a method where he worked himself into the cage little by little, like just my presence, then I'll stick an arm in, then I'll stick my head in. Take a couple of

scratches. Yeah, here and there. And then eventually he found himself earning the trust of the big cats over time and he would find himself completely in the cage. So he was the first dude period, I think. First American. He was the first known, what you would call lion tamer. Yeah. First American was a guy named Isaac Van Ember and he was around in 1833. And he was, what I meant when I said jerks, because he would apparently like beat these cats with crowbars and use very violent tactics. Yeah. And he had a pretty good excuse for it or justification, didn't he? Was that sarcasm? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, he was, he was a biblical guy and he would actually act out biblical scenes with these animals. And his big defense was Genesis 126.

And God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air over the cattle and over all the earth and over everything creeping that creepeth upon the earth. Creep. Creep. And I just like the Bible saying creepeth. Yeah. It's pretty cool. And it just kind of goes on. It's like really, it's one big one run-on sentence and you can't help but wonder if Van Emberg would say the whole thing or he'd just be like, just read Genesis 126. Yeah. His big, his finishing move was sort of insult to injury after he would do all this stuff. And of course he's not beating them with a crowbar in front of people, but apparently that's how he trained them to begin with out of fear and injury. And he would

finish his shows by making the lines lick his boots. Oh man, what a jerk. I know after all that, after suffering at his hands. You know what would be awesome would be to see the steam man of the prairie beat the tar out of Van Emberg. Yeah. You can reference our exoskeleton cast for that one. Right? Yeah. All right. Have you seen Fast Cheap and Out of Control? No. Is that about robots? Oh, you got to see that. It's Errol Morris documentary and it was about a topiary gardener, a robot scientist and a lion tamer. And how all these things sort of intertwined. There was one more, a mole rat specialist. And in the movie Dave Hoover was the lion tamer and Errol Morris also worked in because Hoover was a huge fan of Clyde Beatty. Yeah. And Errol Morris worked in this

old black and white footage and Clyde Beatty was almost the fifth character of that documentary. Oh yeah? Yeah. It's really, really great. Okay. I have a really good wild animal tamer documentary. All right. Let's hear it. You may introduce me to this one. It's called Cat Dancers. Have you heard of it? No. Oh my gosh. It is, it's so heartbreaking. It's ridiculous. Really? It's about this group of people who like have their own thing going on and love one another and love their big cats and then just things keep going wrong. Oh really? It's a really great documentary. It's one of the best I've ever seen in my entire life. Wow. Yeah, I'm going to throw this one out there too is one of my favorites. Okay, go ahead. No, Fast Cheap and Out of Control. Oh, okay.

Oh, well there. It's both on the table. It's crazy though that this podcast features two of our favorite documentaries. Fast Cheap and Out of Control and Cat Dancers. Look for a quiz question on that one. You can get those on Netflix. Exactly. So, Cly Beatty, who was Dave Hoover's hero, was around in the 1920s. He used a pistol and a whip to keep things in line and I think the pistol was like a sound scare, less than like a threatening thing. Right. You go through a lot of lions shooting them in the chest. That's right. It gets expensive, but he was performing at this at this the peak of this lion tamers. You think of an old-timey lion tamer, the peak of the appreciation from the public. Sure. Because a lot of these guys, they shaped

the public expectations, but they were also responding to them. Yeah. And the public has had a role in shaping how lion tamers, lion trainers, interact with their cats. And Beatty was kind of the last of the pistol shooting whip crack in chair guys. The old guy? Yeah. Hoover actually explains the chair and Debbie's right on the money. If you've ever wondered why they point a chair at a lion, it's because apparently these big cats have a one-track mind or they're single-minded. And so the four points of the chair legs confuse it. Yeah. And that's what Hoover said, so I believe it. Well, that's awesome. Yeah. So you've got Henri Martin, who starts everything out very gently using trust. Yeah. And basically just exposing himself to these large cats. He did trust falls.

Right. And the cat would catch him. Right. And then you have Van Emberg coming along, Isaac Van Emberg basically just beating the tar out of these things and using a very different method, fear. And Cly Beatty kind of carries that torch. And then after Beatty, things change. And you have modern lion trainers like Siegfried and Roy, Gunther, Gebel, Williams. Is that how you say his name? Yeah. You're the German speaker. Gunther, Gebel, Williams. Oh, he's just made my eye bleed. Yeah. He, like I said, he was the one that was very big in the 70s and 80s when I was growing up. Right. And apparently he was in an American Express commercial. Oh, yeah. Yeah, with a leopard hanging over him. The Don't Leave Home Without It days, probably. I would imagine. Yeah.

But so then you have this kind of transition to the modern lion trainer, which is actually a circle back to the beginning. A little more genteel. Well, that's just that. It's like using trust. Yeah. Not using beatings. Yeah. And basically just spending time with your animal to let it get to know you. Yeah. And the whip they use, even if you see a whip these days, they're not whipping the animal. The whip is just to sort of like, hey, this is my space. This is your space. Yeah. My space is over here. Exactly. Your space is over there. The war on drugs impacts everyone. Whether or not you take America's public enemy,

number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds tomorrow one. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid for it.

Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Our nation loves true crime. And it's no wonder in the past decade, one in four Americans have reported being victims of crime. But what happens when we survive? That's what we explore in the podcast, Survivors' Heal, hosted by me, Oya El-Sharrells. I've worked as an organizer, activist and advocate for the past 15 years. And for the past five years, I've been on the ground floor providing services to survivors of crime. I invite you all to listen in as we discuss the healing side of true crime and what I call the new Survivors' Movement. Listen to Survivors' Heal, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast

or wherever you get your podcast. Uh, so let's talk about the psychology of all the stuff. Yeah, animal psychology and people psychology. Because it's really not that much different. B.F. Skinner is a person psychologist, very famous one. Yeah, he created the Skinner box. That's right. He has his children in it. Oh, is that what's his face? I don't know. I thought you were talking about the kid that was kept in isolation. Arthur? Oh, baby Albert. Albert. No, no, no, that's totally different. That was some fear extinction that they were studying. This is conditioning that Skinner was all about. So operant conditioning is what we're talking about and that's basically

connecting a behavior with a signal and giving the animal a reward. Yeah. It's like it's pretty much a one, two, three cycle. Yeah, it's basically saying like you did something that's even remotely close to what I want you to do. So here's some food and now you have the animal's attention. Yeah. Like, oh, where did that come from? Right. Now you kind of shape that behavior where it's like, come on, let's try turning to the right. And then if they move to the right, they get a little bit of food. And maybe if they turn all the way to the right, they get a bunch of food. Yeah. And then you have, say, you're leading them with a stick. Yeah. So eventually, you remove the stick and replace it with something like a snap or a clap. Yeah. Or hey,

oh, yes. You hear a lot of that. And all of a sudden you have an animal that can turn in a circle when you do what you just did. That's right. And that's called classical conditioning. Well, it starts with operant and moves into classical conditioning. Operant, then capturing, then shaping, then classical conditioning. And capturing and shaping are part of operant. Exactly. Should we talk about Christian the Lion, I guess? I don't see how we can. It is real, people. If you've seen this on the YouTube, it is not made up. Are you sure? Oh, yeah. Like, you realize what you're saying here, man. Dude, it's as real as like anything in history that happened. Okay. Like, I've seen the documentary about it. And I don't think it was Christopher

Guest who directed it. I can't remember the name of it. Christian the Lion, something like that. You've seen it on YouTube in the 1969, late 60s. A couple of Aussies, John Rindell and Ace Bork, bought a lion from a department store in London. Harrods. Didn't know they sold lions back then. Harrods does. Really? Yeah. It was sort of the head of London at the time. It was like the swinging 60s. And these dudes were known for having this lion and like throwing parties and stuff. It was like pretty cool. And the lion got bigger, of course, and they had to release it into the wild with the help of the born free people. And then there's, of course, the famous video where they went to visit this lion, like, was it years later? It was 1973 or two, I think, 1972. I'm not sure

when they released him, but it was it was quite a while later. And it was a few years. The lion jumps up and like hugs the guys. It was amazing. It was pretty amazing. Yeah. Are you sure it's real? I'm as sure that that's real as that you're real. Otherwise, the biggest hoax has been pulled over the world. Yeah, I don't know about that. I think the Harrods huge biography was tops Christian lion. Yeah, that was pretty good. Yeah. But as Debbie points out, for every Christian lion, there's a secretion, Roy. Yes, which we already kind of covered, but I think we should go a little more into it. Yeah, there's some different theories out there. So in 2003, they were Siegfried and Roy were doing their thing. And apparently they had like, I think 3000 of these performances under

their belts already. Yeah. They were working with Manticore or Montecore, sorry, who was one of their tigers, who they'd raised from a cub and he was now seven years old. So they knew this tiger intimately like they were its parents for all intents and purposes. Yeah. And that's one of the keys to with lion taming is that you raise them from a cub. They're not going on and getting these tigers from the savannah that are grown and then taming them. So the Simpsons were wrong in that respect. Sure. But so during this performance, something happened. Montecore grabbed Roy by his windpipe and dragged him off stage. From the outset, Roy, by the way, is now partially paralyzed and has a crush trachea because of this. But from the outset,

from the moment he regained consciousness, Roy said, do not destroy Montecore. He was like, something happened. He wasn't trying to hurt me. He was trying to protect me. Yeah. And he was just dragging me away from whatever it was. Roy suggested that possibly he had a stroke and that freaked out the tiger. Yeah. Tiger picked up on it. It's also been theorized that a woman, this is almost like the lone gunman theory. Actually, this is the one I believe a woman with a beehive hairdo sitting toward the front row or possibly in the front row was like distracted and confused the tiger. Yeah. Which I guess maybe the tiger was trying to get Roy away from the beehive. Well, what happened, the accounts I read is that this tiger became transfixed on this lady

and started walking toward the lady. And so Roy jumped in between them and the tiger grabbed a hole of his wrist at this point and Roy bopped him on the nose with a microphone, was going, release, release. And he released him and he fell backward at that point. And I think that's when the tiger, or the tiger keep wanting to say lion, that's when he thought that Roy was in trouble because it was a big bru-ha-ha all of a sudden with him falling over, people rushed out there in the confusion. They think that he grabbed him like you would grab a baby kitten around the neck to pull it off stage. Yeah. So that's, I believe that. That sounds sensible. But he didn't let go. Like they sprayed him with this fire extinguisher and they beat him with a fire

extinguisher until he let go. And cut his, what do you call it, the windpipe? Yeah, no, but the bleeder, the... The jugular? The jugular. Yeah. Well, Roy's still alive. He survived. I mean, they actually had a final performance in 2009, six years later. With Montecor? With Montecor. Yeah, because he's still alive. Yep. And he was at the secret garden in dolphin habitat. I've been there. Oh yeah? It's pretty awesome. Where is this? It's in Vegas. Oh, okay. I can't remember what hotel it's at, but... Well, the mirage is where they performed. But I feel like they, if it's, it may be at the mirage. Right. I can't remember. It's also possible it was at another place, but anyway, they have like their lions and couple tigers. They have a bunch of stuff

and it's sad because it's a small zoo, but I'm sure these animals are treated better than the average animal-added zoo. Yeah. But I mean, they're in these enclosed habitats. Well, they get investigated just like modern circuses do. I think there are routine checks by... Which government agency is it? Do you remember? The USDA. The USDA does that. They do circuses, zoos, that kind of thing. Okay. The thing is, is if you're an animal welfare group, you probably don't think the USDA is doing enough. Yeah. And even if they are following the letter of the law, you probably think the letter of the law isn't strong enough. Yeah. And supposedly every single major circus in the United States has been cited for violating

the animal welfare act. Yeah. So I think the whole concept behind lion taming and lion training is fascinating for most people, but then you take another step further and you're like, these are wild animals and captivity. Like, what are you doing? Yeah. Why is your head in its mouth? Exactly. And I'm glad you brought that up because then in the introduction, there's a pretty good description of what a lion can do. What can a lion do? A lion's mouth can open up wider than your head is tall, a foot, 30 centimeters. It's also capable of crushing a bull's spine. I love that reference. That just sounds tough. It is tough. Like a spine of a bull. Yeah. And the claws are about three inches long.

Pretty serious stuff. So I mean, yeah, this is very serious stuff if you're a lion trainer, but at the same time, it's like, what, you know, how do you justify having this act? What's the act for? What's it doing? Yeah. Or is it, is it protecting? Is it conserving? What is it raising awareness? I think people are demanding more explanation than they did in, say, the time of Clyde Beatty. Well, yeah, because back then it was fun to poke and prod things that you thought were unusual and exotic. And there wasn't a lot of respect for it. Like the initial circuses before there were these acts were, I think they had horse acts, but it was mainly like, look at these animals and cages that you've never seen before. Exactly. And look, there's a pygmy.

Yeah. You know, bearded lady. Right. And that guy stinks. So, um, I think Isaac Benjerk was the first guy to put his head in the mouth too, right? He was. Yeah. Unfortunately, the lion didn't finish that job. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take America's public enemy. Number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute a 2,200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs, of course, yes, they can do that. And on the prime example, the war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with

absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil answer for that. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Our nation loves true crime. And it's no wonder in the past decade, one in four Americans have reported being victims of crime. But what happens when we survive? That's what we explore in the podcast, Survivors Heal, hosted by me, Oya El-Sharrells. I've worked as an organizer, activist, and advocate for the past

15 years. And for the past five years, I've been on the ground floor providing services to survivors of crime. I invite you all to listen in as we discuss the healing side of true crime and what I call the new Survivors Movement. Listen to Survivors Heal, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Man, we have like a whole suite of circus art stuff. Human cannonball? Oh yeah, yeah. Man, we've got, we have several others. Circus arts. Yeah, that's what it's called. If you even look on the channel, it's entertainment.howstuffworks.com slash arts slash circus arts. Wow. It has a sub channel, circus arts sub channel at Howstuff Works, because that's the kind of site it is.

And if you go to that sub channel, you don't even need to do that. You can go to the search bar on the homepage at howstuffworks.com and type in why in taming and it'll bring up this article. Yeah, I think we, I know we talked about something else because I mentioned that I go to the Big Apple Circus when it comes through town. Yeah. I remember talking about that. And that's the one where they have like a horse, they still have the equestrian show and like dogs jumping through hoops. But other than that, it's like clowns and jugglers and like the Cirque du Soleil beats of strength. No animals, no big cat. People are the run from the law. Yeah, it's not like the Goddy Ringling Brothers now. Good to know. I haven't seen the circus and I can't even tell you how

well. You should, you and you should check out the Big Apple Circus. Oh yeah? Yeah, it's neat. All right, we'll check it out. It's like very small and intimate. It's like, it feels like what you might expect the circus 100 years ago to be like. Will you send me an email when it's coming? I will. Okay. Okay. I sent search bar, by the way. All right. So that means listener mail? Yeah. This is from, I'm going to call this, we helped someone kick heroin. Did you read this? Awesome. Hey guys, I've been meaning to write you for a very long time. I've been listening to you pretty much since day one, learning and loving every step of the way. However, it was almost a year ago,

I chose to check myself into drug treatment. See, I am a marine, female marine, no longer active duty, but when I was injured, I was given a lot of painkillers and ended up getting addicted to those. And that eventually led to me getting strung out on heroin for years. What does this have to do with you? Well, heroin detox is one of the worst things you can imagine. We were not allowed to listen to music or watch TV or pretty much do anything, but classes and groups. I agree that it helped me being an immediate blackout, but I did beg the staff to let me listen to you guys. To my amazement, my doctor was a fan of yours and approved it. Awesome. So while I was going through the worst

of it, you were both there with me. I will spare you the details. So August 15th is not only... I think we've both seen the Seinfeld where Elaine's dating the guy who's kicking heroin. Did she date a guy kicking heroin? Yeah, don't you remember? I don't think I remember that. We should check that one out. Sorry, go ahead. So now August 15th is not only my birthday, I'm 29 this year, but also my first birthday off drugs. Oh, congratulations. I want to thank you for what you've done for me, and I'm going to go back and listen to them all again. I know it is a lot to ask, but a shout out would make my day. Dude. And Elaine Turley. Elaine, don't tell me that's a coincidence. Well, it's A. It's called an A, Elaine.

She says, Simper Fi from Elaine Turley. That's awesome. And then she says, P.S. Marines are the few and the proud. Female Marines are the fewer and the prouder. Nice. So, way to go, man. Yeah. I want to say, man, lady. That's a pretty awesome. Yeah. You kicked heroin with us. That's amazing. Yeah. Can you think about that? Wow, man. That was a mind-blower, Chuck. Pretty good one. If you have a mind-blowing story that relates to us, even if it doesn't, that's cool. But if it does, wow, that's even better. You can tweet to us at S.Y.S.K. podcast. That's our Twitter handle. Facebook.com slash stuff you should know is where we dwell on Facebook. You can also send us an email to

stuffpodcast at discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil asset for it. Be sure to listen to The War on Drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. iHeart Radio presents IntraQuest, an adventure podcast. I'm Ether and big guy is Sirius. I'm logo. I'm here to seek your services

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