THRICE MAULED BY LIONS.

Dominion, Volume 7, Issue 1871, 3 October 1913, Page 5

THRICE MAULED BY LIONS.

4 PERILS OF FILM-MAKING. Three months ago Captain Jack Bonavita, the world-famous animal tamer, added one moro to a long list of desperate and damaging adventures sustained as a wild-beast expert. Ho was playing in a film drama entitled "In tho Sultan's Power." The Sultan is an old reprobate, with a predilection for kidnapping white girls. His harem is at tho top of the palace and on tho ground beneath tho windows fierce lions, ' purposely kept hungry, roam ceaselessly within stout iron barriers. _ Bon : avita supplied the lions for the picture drama —also, ho supplied the tamer, and incidentally a sensational "turn" that was not on the programme, and that nearly terminated his chequered existence. Ho got inside the enclosure to toaso tho lions, for the benefit of tho Sultan's visitors. One of them, Brutus, which had previously mauled him almost to death, got "cranky," and flew at him. The trainer was thrown violently, and the lion attacked him with such ferocity that it was all tho attendants could, do to get him out of tho cage alive. The operator turned tho handle up to tho time that Bonavita was thrown down. That much of tho attack is clearly show in tho film. At tho time of this mauling Bonavita ■ had scarcely recovered from an awful gruelling that the same lion, Brutus, gavo him in another film drama, in which ho played a man lost in the jungle. He had to assume tho part of a weak, emaciated, half-crazy sufferer, stumbling niul falling. Ho played tho ■art so well that tho lion was deceived, and, seeing his enemy apparently within his power, attacked him fiercely. Bonavita defended himshelf with a bludgeon ithat was concealed in the grass, but despite a terrific clubbing about the snout, Brutus tore him bad'v. The man had only 0110 hand to defend himself with. The other was bitten off by tho lion Baltimore in 1905. But 110 did not mind the mauling. Indeed, lie prolonged the contest as long as ho could, shouting to the operator to "keep turning." When, he found that tho man at the crank'had been too terrified to move after the lion's first attack, Bonavita cursed him for a coward and Quietly fainted.