Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 April 1895 — Cats Are Hard to Manage. [ARTICLE]

Cats Are Hard to Manage.

An English exhibitor of trainee animals. Leoni Clarke, is reported as saying that, though he has educated all sorts of animals from lions downward, he has found that the most difficult of them all is the cat. He has to treat these creatures with extraordinary care. A dog is sensible, a monkey accommodating, and a rat either forgives or forgets, but a cat! She is a hopeless bundle of sensibilities. Strike her once, if only by accident, and she will never perform again. Kindness is not only politic, it is absolutely necessary, in the training of cats. Although thirty cats are sufficient for his entertainment, he has sixty or more with him, for cats are very skittish creatures, and when they take the whim into their heads it is useless to take them on the stage. When Mr. Clarke enters the stable the mewing is prodigious, and he is instantly buried in a moving mantle of cats. It took him four years to train some of his animals before he could put them upon the stage. A parachute cat, which climbs up a rope to the roof of the theater, and flies down by parachute, is the second which has done the trick. The first became too fat, and fell into bad ways. It is now Jim Corbett, and boxes Mitchell nightly. A curious feature of the show is the way in which the cats walk over a rope of rats and mice and canaries, stepping gingerly between the little fluttering bodies. This mighty forbearance is brought about by training up the cats from kittens in the same cage as the rats and birds. There are only six of his cats that Mr. Clarke dares trust among the rats. The ruts and mice come from Java.