Fear of the Animal Planet. Jason Hribal
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standard procedure. “That doesn’t sound like an escape attempt to me,” he began to explain. The bear was simply being a bear. Yes, the zoo is now planning to raise the walls of Ulu’s exhibit, but not because of what Ulu did. In all seriousness, the zoo’s PR flacks suggested, this kind of scrutiny and questioning is unnecessary if not vindictive. The zoo is the real victim.
There is an African proverb. “Until the lion has his historian, the hunter will always be a hero.” For myself, the meaning behind the adage has long represented a challenge—one which I took up in 1998. I had just recently matriculated to the University of Toledo in order to study with the historian Peter Linebaugh. My purpose was singular: I wanted to understand history from below. That fall, I took a research seminar on the Gilded Age, and the topic I chose to write about was the Toledo Zoo. It could have ended up being a standard history: the zoo and its directors, their curatorial ideas and the evolution in exhibit design, and a list of animals. Yet, my work with Linebaugh led me to see the research material in a new light. Information that I would have previously missed or passed over now became evident. More specifically, I noticed that the captive animals were resisting and that resistance was having an effect. The zoo and the circus no longer remained the hero.
In late 2006, I decided to engage this topic once again, and, through my research, the resistance became ever more evident. Captive animals escaped their cages. They attacked their keepers. They demanded more food. They refused to perform. They refused to reproduce. The resistance itself could be organized. Indeed, not only did the animals have a history, they were making history. For their resistance led directly to historical change. In the case of Tatiana, her eyes were burning bright that Christmas day. She inspired others and brought about larger questions concerning captivity and agency. Concerned citizens, animal advocacy groups, and the City Board of Supervisors all got involved. Even the Wall Street Journal published an article exploring the incident. The San Francisco Zoo, for its part, still has not recovered. Yet, we must never forget from where this struggle begins and ends: with the animals themselves.
A note on the book’s primary and secondary sources. The vast majority of information came directly from newspapers, both national and international. Federal, state and local governmental documents filled in some important details. Lawsuits and their trail of paperwork supplied a scant more. On-line databases were rich with biographical detail—in particular, the Orca Homepage at www.orcahome.de and the Elephants Encyclopedia at www.elephant.se. Writings by the various 19th and early 20th century animal collectors, such as Frank Buck, Carl Hagenbeck, and Charles Mayer, were certainly of use—as were the manuscript collections at the Local History Department at the Toledo/Lucas County Library and the Toledo Zoo. Bandwagon, journal of the Circus Historical Society, assisted with its long-reaching archives. A handful of contemporary books were also helpful: Susan Davis, Spectacular Nature (Berkeley, 1997). Alan Greene, Animal Underworld (NY: 1999). Erich Hoyt, The Performing Orca (Bath, 1992). Eugene Linden, The Parrot’s Lament (New York, 1999). Dale Peterson and Jane Goodall, Visions of Caliban (Athens, 2000). Charles Price, The Day They Hung the Elephant (Johnson City, 1992). Don Reed, Notes from an Underwater Zoo (New York, 1981).
Chapter One: Elephants Exit the Big Top
When he arrived at Regent’s Park in 1865, the elephant was sickly and underweight. Zoo officials were, to say the least, disappointed in their newest acquisition. Sure, he was quite young. But he was a bull-male. Shouldn’t he have been a little bit bigger? In any case, this runt of an elephant needed a name. Park directors set to thinking. The calf was taken, so they thought, from somewhere inside of the French Sudan, and the cultures there were known for worshipping an idol called Mumbo Jumbo. Why not just shorten this and call him “Jumbo.” Indeed, they decided, this would be a fitting name. It would ultimately prove to be a most ironic choice.
In truth, Mumbo Jumbo was anything but a complimentary christening for an elephant or any other creature. For the word was derogatory and demeaning—originating, not from the African lexicon, but from the European imperialist imagination. Mumbo Jumbo was a “grotesque” idol, an object of unintelligent veneration. Today, the title continues to hold onto its negative ethnocentrism: referring to obscure meaningless talk and writing; nonsense; or an ignorant ritual. Yet the abbreviated version of the term, Jumbo, has not. Its history has actually flowed in the opposite direction. Jumbo has come to mean big and enormous. It connotes success and skill. A jumboism is a preference for largeness. Jumbomania is the idolization of largeness. A century ago, the mere whisper of “Jumbo” could bring about smiles and cheers. Its mention could even cause tears, sorrow, and solemn remembrance. Jumbo remains a word of respect. How did this divergence between the longer and shorter versions of the term happen?
The story begins with the capture of an infant elephant in Eastern (not Western) Africa, some time around 1861–2. After a lengthy and arduous journey across the Sahara Desert, the elephant who would become Jumbo ended up in the markets of Cairo, Egypt. There, he was spotted and purchased by the animal collector Johann Schmidt. Schmidt specialized in the trade of exotic creatures. He bought them from trappers for a low price and sold them to European zoos for a high price. Such were the beginnings for one young, little elephant.
Schmidt dispatched his precious cargo across the Mediterranean Sea. Arriving in continental Europe, the elephant was then transported over-land to Paris. Jumbo’s new home turned out to be none other than the famous Jardin des Plantes. He was soon introduced to his first cage-mate. This was Alice, a young African female elephant. The pair, though, did not remain in the City of Lights for long.
The managers of the French menagerie soon decided that they wanted to add an Indian rhinoceros to the collection. The London zoo happened to have one and was willing to make a trade for a pair of elephants. With the deal agreed upon, Jumbo and Alice were shipped across the English Channel. The two arrived in London in 1865. The male elephant made for a disappointing show. Sickly and thin, he looked as if he could die at any moment. But, over the next few weeks, he made a robust recovery.
For the next seventeen years, Jumbo remained in London. And he grew and grew and grew: in terms of both size and popularity. Reaching a height of eleven and a half feet, the elephant came to weigh-in at a hefty six-and-a-half tons. This sheer size earned him the title of the world’s largest elephant. As for his popularity, everyone knew about Jumbo: from the thousands of yearly visitors who gazed their eyes upon him during his exhibitions to the countless number of schoolchildren who rode on his back in the howdah (or Indian carriage). Even Queen Victoria, Theodore Roosevelt, and P.T. Barnum once made that steep climb onto the broad back of this mighty pachyderm. Jumbo was almost as well known in the Americas as he was in England. Yet, not everything was quite as idyllic as it might seem. For the Regent’s Park Zoo did have a serious problem on its hands—one which it zealously kept secret from the general public.
Jumbo had always been known for his mild temperament. He was friendly to visitors. He was gentle around children. But, as he entered into his teens, his mood and behavior began to change. Jumbo had his own personal handler, a man called Matthew Scott. Scott earned his reputation as a top rank animal trainer years earlier when attempting to trap an angry, adult hippopotamus. The animal had escaped his enclosure and was running amok in the park. When cornered by the keeper, the hippo charged him and took a ferocious snap. Scott only survived this attack with his life and limbs intact by nimbly hopping a fence at the last second. His new job, by contrast, looked at first to be far simpler: taking care of a gentle elephant. By the 1880s, however, Scott found this assignment to be ever more challenging. Jumbo had now entered into adolescence.
Modern zoologists call this developmental period: musth (Hindi word for madness). And they define it as a phase of glandular secretion, higher testosterone-levels, and heighten sexual arousal. In other words, this is a case of over-active and uncontrollable hormones; otherwise known as “heat.” One would have hoped that the fields of natural science would have moved beyond the 17th century and biological determinism. But to no avail. Non-physiological factors—such as captivity, poor labor-conditions, brutal training methods, or the grind of the entertainment industry—do not matter. Intellectual maturity and independence of mind are not considered. Rebellious attitudes and vengeful emotions do not exist. Freedom, or the desire for autonomy, is something that an elephant could never imagine. Agency is a non-concept.
But