The Intimate Bond (36 page)

Curiosity seekers visited commercial menageries such as the Exeter 'Change or George Wombell's shows. The Zoological Society of London opened its gardens in a corner of Regent's Park in 1828 with serious scientific goals. No fewer than 112,226 people visited what the society called “a general Zoological Collection.” The animals, and their carcasses when they died, were available for serious research; access to the gardens was for members only or by invitation, but not for the poor or the populace as a whole. This policy didn't endure, for financial reasons, however fashionable the London Zoo became among the elite.
Such menageries rapidly became a symbol of progress and enlightenment, of emerging empire. The zoo became, as one commentator in the
Quarterly Review
observed, a way of rescuing the poor from “the fascinations of the public house.”
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Humble visitors were thought to find “improvement” and, indirectly, to participate in conquests of remote, recently explored places.

The Zoological Society used its gardens to make sense of the animal kingdom, to highlight for the general public the links between different species. The Zoo encouraged interaction with the animals, especially feeding the bears, which became so popular that the humor magazine
Punch
showed a group of them suffering from dyspepsia caused by “31,457 buns.”
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Camel and elephant rides and petting small animals were grist for the popular mill, despite the danger of losing one's hat to a monkey or baboon, or being spat upon by a camel or llama. The greatest attraction was always the big cats, especially when viewed at feeding time as they growled and roared and tossed about meat and bones with wild abandon. Some animals, like Obaysch, the first live hippopotamus to visit Europe since Roman times, became celebrities, as did numerous gifted chimpanzees. To achieve such status they had to be either large or possessed of unusual intelligence. Stocking the Zoo became a quasi-official duty for consuls and colonial officials, just as collecting Ancient Egyptian antiquities had been a charge for British and French diplomats in Cairo after the Napoleonic Wars.

Maintaining exotic animals in captivity meant successful breeding, and even attempts to domesticate some of them for human use. A small number of wealthy landowners maintained breeding menageries on their estates. Most preferred animals that could be eaten. At his death in 1851, Edward Smith Stanley, Earl of Derby, maintained a park with 345 mammals and 1,272 birds from 94 species. Most were antelope and deer, also llamas, zebras, and other animals gathered not for display but for breeding experiments. Many groups devoted to what was called “acclimatizing” enjoyed feasts of dishes created from exotic beasts. The Acclimatization Society hosted a dinner in 1863 that included bird's nest soup, kangaroo ham, Syrian pig, leporine, and Chinese sheep.

Kill! Kill! Kill!

Menageries official and unofficial displayed exotic beasts of all kinds as spoils of a growing empire. But they also symbolized the high-risk, adventurous lives of the bold individuals who collected and hunted such creatures. The living trophies of empire went up for sale in London's wild animal shops, large and small. Most of the animals they sold were smaller species, for to obtain a beast such as a lion meant killing the mother and capturing her cubs, a dangerous undertaking under the best of circumstances.

The frontiers of empire moved away from coasts and into remoter parts of Africa and Asia during the mid-nineteenth century. Many officials collected young animals, especially the most desirable beasts such as lions, tigers, elephants, or zebras.
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Acquiring, caring for, and shipping them was both expensive and time consuming, so the emphasis shifted to spectacular hunting trophies. Now hunters sought magnificent beasts, killed deep in the bush and then sent home to be stuffed and displayed against suitable backgrounds. The symbolism was obvious: victory in the field over animals just as it was over rebellious tribesmen on India's Northwest Frontier or Zulu warriors in southern Africa. Trophy displays of dangerous animals appeared in museums and attracted large crowds. The Great Exhibition of 1851 included all manner of game animals, from rare British birds to Indian tigers. Exhibits of suitably mounted hunting trophies graced the Paris Exposition of 1867. A collection of hunting trophies “'ecured in the wildest parts of North America by the prowess of British sportsmen” graced the American Exhibition of 1887 in London.

Big-game hunting seemed romantic and dangerous, adventure that unfolded in remote lands and deep in the bush. Elephants and rhinoceroses charged, bears stood on their hind legs to challenge repeater rifles, expert stalkers tracked wary antelope through thick brush. Magnificent, slaughtered antelope or hippopotami in carefully arranged rows graced photographs published in books and displayed, alongside the stuffed heads of the prey, in palatial country houses. Some big-game hunters such as Roualeyn George Gordon-Cumming (1820–1866) and Frederick
Courteney Selous (1851–1917) traveled deep into the African interior. Gordon-Cumming became an elephant ivory hunter for five years. In 1849, he returned home with thirty tons of trophies and a safari wagon—also a Bushman. In 1850, he published a popular book about his adventures and opened an exhibit that thrived for eight years and appeared at the Great Exhibition in 1851. For an extra charge, the visitor could hear Gordon-Cumming, the “lion hunter,” lecture with a musical accompaniment. He became a popular celebrity, widely admired as “the greatest hunter of modern times.”
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While Gordon-Cumming exuded a love of sport and trophy hunting, Frederick Courtney Selous had a long career in colonial service and as a soldier. By 1895, he had spent more than twenty years as an ivory hunter and specimen collector in southern Africa. Eschewing lantern slides, then a hot attraction, he lectured while surrounded by “certain of the most remarkable lions and other animals which had fallen to the lecturer's gun.”
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He told captivating stories of encounters with lions and hostile warriors that held his audiences spellbound for well over an hour. In 1919, his widow presented no fewer than 524 stuffed mammals from his collection to the Natural History Museum in London, including 19 lions.

By the outbreak of World War I, dead wild animal heads by the hundreds adorned country houses and museums. (Our values have changed. Now many of the same trophies reside in junk stores in an era with far more austere views on big-game hunting.) The mounted bestiary testified to the bloody triumphs of government officials and sportsmen intent on bagging fine specimens, then skinning and drying them in the field before shipping them home, where expert taxidermists attempted to reproduce the animal as it had appeared in the wild. Selous wrote of an eland, a large antelope by any standards, that he hoped to see “set up in such a manner that would recall to my mind, to some degree, the splendid creature he looked when alive.”
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During the nineteenth century, the big-game hunter emerged not only as a popular hero and a “sportsman,” but as an empire builder striking out into virgin imperial territory. His hunts were a symbol of advancing civilization, the subject of patriotic fervor. Colonial
administrators, military officers, even missionaries, and just plain leisure travelers with a “proclivity” for shooting descended on Africa and Asia, repeater rifles in hand. A tidal wave of big-game narratives weighed down Victorian bookshelves, a genre remarkable for its monotonous and enthusiastic recounting of slaughter, whether of African elephants, Bengal tigers, or North American buffalo. Such hunting raised violent passions in its practitioners, an overwhelming sense of power. They wrote of “whole hecatombs of slaughter,” of big-game hunting as “one of the most powerful affections of the human mind.” They also talked of the salutary effects of life in the open, in the wilderness, where one's qualities of resourcefulness and enterprise came to the fore. Invariably, the hero was cool in manner, restrained, and of course, had a sense of humor. The published accounts stressed riskier hunts, described the death throes of the quarry in dispassionate prose, everything coming down to an insatiable lust to kill some animal or other. Killing game became a passion for those who served in the colonies.

As firearms became more accurate and shooting large animals became easier, the emphasis shifted from wholesale slaughter to the bagging of superlative heads and horns. Game became scarcer, which is hardly surprising given the tallies of victims in many hunting narratives. A good day's hunting in India's Mysore State could include twenty-nine buffalo, about a hundred fifty hippopotami, and ninety-one elephants in “a most splendid hunt.” By the time a reaction set in against indiscriminate hunting, large tracts of the world had been denuded of their larger animals, this apart from the depredations of the fur trade in North America and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the focus of empire changed from conquest and force to administration. As part of that much more prosaic task, a need to conserve, manage, and protect wild animals slowly replaced the most violent confrontation between animals and humans in history. Big-game hunting represented part of the dilemma about animals that confronted the Victorians—and that, to a considerable extent, still confronts us today. Nowhere was this ambivalence more evident than in the emerging middle-class passion for domestic pets.

Purebreds and Mongrels

When the poet Lord Byron buried his Newfoundland dog Boatswain in 1808, he interred it on sacred ground with an epitaph that spoke of “all the Virtues of Man without his vices.”
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By Byron's time, pet keeping was becoming commonplace among more ordinary folk, in a period when displaying public affection toward animals became more acceptable.

During the mid-nineteenth century, a positive cult of pet keeping arose in Victorian society, generating a huge trade in live animals, with twenty thousand such street traders in London alone.
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Thieves even stole animals and returned them for a ransom, this apart from a booming trade in everything from dog collars to animal brushes, and in books aimed at pet fanciers, hitherto written mainly for owners of hounds and gun dogs. Pet fancying became a virtual obsession for many people, with fanciers becoming the backbone of the RSCPA and other anticruelty groups.

Nowhere does one witness Victorian ambivalence more clearly than among dog fanciers. From the beginning, a hierarchy developed between the dogs of well-heeled masters and mistresses at one end of the spectrum and working canines and their owners at the other. Dog fanciers cherished elite patronage as a way of identifying with their social superiors. For example, terriers and pugs enjoyed high popularity; bulldogs, originally an animal associated with fighting and lower-class sporting activities, achieved great popularity as pets during the late nineteenth century. By then, the lines had been drawn firmly between sporting dogs of the countryside and the pets of urban fanciers. Canines occupied a whole range of social ranks, with a strong preference among the aristocracy for breeds with little association with lower-class pet lovers. As the nineteenth century unfolded, so the chasm between purebred dogs—the breeds were usually artificial formulations—and mongrels widened. Mixed-breed animals were thought to cause much of the mischief and dog-biting incidents in city streets, and were shunned. Experts solemnly advised pet fanciers to steer clear of mongrels and to embrace purebred animals.

Part of the ever-closer attention paid to breeds came from the growing popularity of dog shows.
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The first truly formal event, sponsored
by a sporting gun maker named Pape, was in Newcastle-on-Tyne, in northeastern England, on June 28, 1859. There were sixty entries in the show, with classes for pointers and setters only. The idea soon achieved remarkable popularity. A large show with more than a thousand entries, at Chelsea, on the west side of London, opened to wide acclaim in 1863. Not that these were the first such functions, for highly informal shows were commonplace in London public houses well before 1859. The audience served as exhibitors and judges, reaching what Harriet Ritvo calls a “convivial consensus.” These events often took place in rooms used on other days for rat-killing contests. For all their humble, and probably often disorderly, ancestry, dog shows caught on like wildfire, many of them purely local events that prepared exhibitors for the major shows of the national circuit. In 1899, almost fifteen hundred dogs competed in the national Kennel Club show. Wrote an expert in 1900, “Taking out Saturdays and Sundays, there is a Dog Show being held somewhere or other on every ordinary day of the year.”
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Figure 18.2
  This cartoon by George Bowers speaks volumes about the Victorian passion for pets. Cartoonstock.

All this activity revolved around dog breeding. The shows themselves were usually models of decorum, but the conditions behind the scenes were appalling. Cages were inadequate, and water and food were in short supply; chains were too short, so the animals were let out frequently. Under such circumstances the risks of infection, especially from distemper, were very high, so much so that entrants were in as much danger of losing their lives from disease as they were from inquisitive spectators. No railroad provided adequate accommodation for show dogs. They huddled in filthy vans, often dying from cold and hunger. The atmosphere, even at big shows, was conducive to cheating and misrepresentation. The Kennel Club, formed in 1873, came into being as a way of establishing the pedigrees of different breeds. The club's untiring efforts paid off when showing dogs became a well-regulated and respectable pastime. This was largely the work of middle-class dog fanciers, who were determined to carve out a place in the strongly hierarchical British society of the day.