Trained by Alex Kerr for this appearance with Bertram Mills' circus, Olympia, London 1950-1951
His trainer Alex Kerr spent three or four weeks living with the lions night and day looking after them and speaking to them in a mixture of German and his own Glaswegian dialect. In this way he got to know each of the lions’ personalities and the lions became familiar with him.
It took six months of patient training to perfect Negus’s tightrope walking act. A four centimetre thick cable was laid on the ground until Negus realised it did not hurt him to walk along it.
Then day after day, tempted by pieces of meat, Negus learned to walk step by step across the rope.
Next the ropes were raised off the ground - at first by 15 centimetres and then by half a metre, and so on up to the final height of nearly two metres. On the extreme right of this picture of Negus we can see the trainer’s stick telling the Lion where to put his next step. If you look carefully you can see that Negus is focused completely on this stick.
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4 comments:
Nice training but looks very awkward.
As you said - would slow down the act big time.
Steve,
How about the description of how the behavior was trained? Have you ever heard of doing it that way? I never have. Maybe we will hear from Clubb, on whether that is a practical way to train the wire walk.
Regards mate,
Wade
No - I've never heard of it being trained that way but then, I've never seen this trick in the flesh and have never had the desire to try to train it.
With leopards I think it could look good with the cat springing up to the platform and strolling across the ropes but leopards are more physically suited to this than lions. A lion would just look awkward. However, I have never owned a leopard let alone tried to train one so I too would be interested to hear from Jim and Emile.
Terrel Jacobs always had A tight rope walking lion just like that.john h.
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