The Hunt for the Golden Mole (4 page)

Already I had half an answer, but I wanted to find a whole one.

CHAPTER TWO

Rhinoceros Pie

S
ir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore and discoverer of the clouded leopard, was the unstoppable force behind the establishment of the Zoological Society of London in 1826. He lived only long enough to chair its first two meetings before a stroke – ‘apoplexy' in the language of the time – killed him on the eve of his forty-fifth birthday. But he had taken the crucial first step. Sir Humphry Davy and the Marquis of Lansdowne continued what he had begun, and the world's first scientific zoo opened at Regent's Park in 1828. Initially, the word ‘scientific' was rigidly interpreted. Only fellows of the society were permitted to enter – a situation that would last until 1847. Even then, visitors needed a letter of recommendation and were barred on Sundays. It was undemocratic, and the science was rough round the edges, but it was progress. People began to think more carefully about animals – their physiology, their self-awareness, their behaviour – and zookeepers set out on the rocky road to enlightenment. It was an example that soon would be followed in other new zoos throughout Europe and America.

On a warm August day 163 years later, the Broadwalk in Regent's Park is a dawdling caravan of parents and children, all heading towards the zoo. Those bored or exhausted by the long trek from the bus or underground are kept moving by a promise
which in all the years has never lost its potency.
Shall we go and see the gorillas?
I hear it time and again. The children will be disappointed only by the inert disinterest of the animals on the other side of the glass. My own hope – to see a living example of one of the surviving species of golden mole – has already been dashed. The zoo has told me it doesn't have one. And it gets worse. According to the online International Species Information System (ISIS), neither does any other zoo in the world. Golden moles may be ‘vulnerable', ‘endangered', or ‘critically endangered', according to IUCN conservation criteria, but I can detect no effort to conserve them.

I don't do much better with the ‘peculiarities' that so diverted Alfred Russel Wallace in southern Africa. Where the aardvarks ought to be, I see only meerkats. There are no hyenas, aardwolves or elephant shrews, though for compensation there is a magnificent okapi – a species known to Wallace only in the last few years of his life.

London Zoo now would astonish its nineteenth-century superintendent Abraham Dee Bartlett. Few of the original buildings survive, and many of the stars of the early collection – bears, elephants, hippos, rhinos, pandas – have been taken away. Some, like the quagga, are globally extinct. For pioneers such as Bartlett, keeping animals was a process of trial and error. His exhibits were not captive-bred specimens of known provenance, well-documented health and studied habit. They were wild-caught strangers wreathed in mystery. Bartlett recorded the arrival on 22 May 1869 of the zoo's first panda. It was not in good shape.

‘I found the animal in a very exhausted condition, not able to stand, and so weak that it could with difficulty crawl from one end of its long cage to the other. It was suffering from
frequent discharges of frothy, slimy faecal matter. This filth had so completely covered and matted its fur that its appearance and smell was most offensive.' He identifies the species as
Ailurus fulgens
, the small, teddy-bear-like red panda, not the giant panda
Ailuropoda melanoleuca
, but most people today would be able to guess what it ate – mostly bamboo, supplemented by eggs, birds and small mammals. Bartlett, however, knew none of this. ‘The instructions I received with reference to its food were that it should have about a quart of milk per day, with a little boiled rice and grass. It was evident that this food, the change of climate, the sea voyage, or the treatment on board ship had reduced the poor beast to this pitiable condition.' With no textbook to consult, Bartlett could only guess what to feed it with. He went to work with a zeal that might have earned the envy of his contemporary, Isabella Beeton. First he tried raw and boiled chicken, rabbit and ‘other animal substances', but the panda would have none of them. ‘I found, however, it would take arrowroot, with the yelks [sic] of eggs and sugar mixed with boiled milk; and in a few days I saw some improvement in its condition. I then gave it strong beef-tea well sweetened, adding pea-flour, Indian-corn flour, and other farinaceous food, varying the mixture daily.'

Soon the panda was well enough to be let out into the gardens, where it straightaway attacked the fruit and foliage. It liked particularly the large yellow berries of a tree Bartlett named as
Pyrus vestita
, now better known as
Sorbus cuspidata
, a native of China, the country whose south-western provinces are the panda's home. ‘He would grasp the bunch in his paw, holding it tightly, and bite off these berries one by one; so delighted with this food was he, that all other food was left as long as these berries lasted.' It enabled Bartlett to conclude ‘that berries, fruit, and other vegetable substances constitute the food of this
animal in a wild state'. For zookeepers of the nineteenth century, this was how it went. They would work like field naturalists on the basis of observation wherever that was possible, and by trial and error when it wasn't.

They also learned to respect wild animals' natures, and did not expect them to cosy up like family pets. Bartlett noted somewhat ruefully the panda's ‘fierce and angry disposition', though he believed this to be a peculiarity of the individual and not necessarily typical of the species. Even an attack was the subject of careful study: ‘When offended, it would rush at me and strike with both feet, not, like a cat, sideways or downwards, but forward, and the body raised like a bear, the claws protruding, but not hooked or brought down like the claws of a cat . . .'

One of Bartlett's many scientific acquaintances, and a frequent visitor to the zoo, was a naturalist called Frank Buckland, who (as we shall see) studied all things zoological with a passion that verged on mania. He was also a prolific writer who liked to publish his correspondence with other enthusiasts. One of these was Bartlett, who sent him a long description of how he had treated a hippopotamus with a broken tooth. Deciding that extraction was the only answer, and working from behind an oak fence, he had proceeded with ‘a fearful struggle' involving an enormous pair of forceps more than two feet long. The operation began well. He quickly managed to get a grip on the fractured incisor, which he intended to remove ‘with a firm and determined twist'. The hippo, alas, was both firmer and more determined, and the forceps were wrenched from Bartlett's grasp. It was a tribute to the quality of the carpenters' work that the fence stood up to the animal's charge and Bartlett survived to try again. This time he had a little more success – the tooth was actually loosened – but again the patient had the better of him and the forceps went flying. The third attempt
artfully capitalised on the animal's rage. ‘Looking as wild as a hippopotamus can look', the monster advanced upon Bartlett with its jaws at full stretch, wide enough to swallow a canoe. The ‘coveted morsel', as Bartlett put it, was then easily grasped and, ‘with a good sharp pull and a twist', drawn out. Like everything else about the animal, it was huge. ‘One of the most remarkable things,' Bartlett wrote, ‘appeared to me to be the enormous force of the air when blown from the dilated nostrils of this great beast while enraged. It came against me with a force that quite surprised me.'

One cannot quarrel with Buckland's opinion that the superintendent ‘deserves great credit for his ingenuity and the surgical skill he displayed with his huge patient'. In many ways Buckland himself was no less adventurous. It was his habit, for example, to cook and eat animals that had died in the zoo, and he once entertained an audience at Brighton by serving them rhinoceros pie. His real passion, however, was what he liked to call
hippophagotomy
, or the consumption of horseflesh. This had begun with an invitation to lunch, and a challenge, from Bartlett himself, who had placed ‘two exceedingly fine hot steaks' on the table. One was ‘rump-steak proper', and the other a slice of horse. In a blind tasting, both men preferred the horse. ‘Uncommon good,' said Buckland.

But he knew his enthusiasm would not be widely shared. Indeed, it gave him the idea for a novel method of deterring crime. It was perfectly simple. The ‘lower classes', he argued, had an irrational horror of eating horse, which they regarded as fit only for cats. Therefore all that was needed to curb their anti-social tendencies was to serve the stuff in prisons. ‘Be assured these fellows who would garrote [sic] you, murder your wives and children, or commit the most fearful crimes, would shudder at the thought of dining upon horseflesh.' The theory
was never put into practice, though its basic premiss was vividly demonstrated early in 2013 when some meat products in England and France were found to contain more horse than beef. In the face of public outrage, supermarkets competed to out-apologise each other and be first to clear ‘value' burgers, lasagne and spaghetti bolognese from their shelves. Regulatory authorities across Europe swooped on shops, processors and abattoirs, and the British prime minister was urged by the leader of the opposition to ‘get a grip'.

It took a lot to make Buckland himself shudder. Squeamishness was not in his vocabulary. When an old lion died at the zoo, he was present at the dissection to peel the skin from the foot and fiddle with the tendons (they worked ‘with the ease of a greased rope in a well-worn pulley'). When lions broke out of their cage at Astley's Royal Amphitheatre in Westminster Bridge Road, Lambeth – birthplace of the circus ring – he was on hand to examine the corpse of the unlucky stable-hand who got in their way. ‘It will probably interest the reader, to read some remarks on the nature of the wounds, and on the probable way, judging from these wounds, in which the lion seized the man.' And on he went, scratch by scratch, bite by bite. ‘I account for there being so many more wounds on the left side than on the right side by assuming that the lion (as is its habit) cuffed him first on the right side and caught and held him on the left, just as we see a kitten playing with a ball of worsted.'

Buckland was a disputatious fellow, probably not the kind of man it would have been wise to accuse of hypocrisy to his face. A hundred and thirty years after his death, however, he seems fair game. Like most gentlemen of his time, he was an eager sportsman who enjoyed nothing better than a duck-shoot at dawn, proudly recording the rain of teal and widgeon from the sky. But if he was easy of conscience, he was markedly less
forgiving of others. In the third volume of his
Curiosities of Natural History
, he seems suddenly overcome by loathing for his fellow hunters:

In reading the accounts of the mighty elephant in the jungle of India, of the watching for the beasts of the forest drinking at midnight at the lone desert fountain in Central Africa, of the fierce gorilla in the dense forests of the tropics, or of wild ducks and swans on some lonely lake or swamp, I often come on the most exciting description of the discovery of these creatures, feeding quietly and undisturbed in their native homes. What a chance, what an opportunity of learning their habits, and their loves, and their wars! But – No; man thirsts for their blood. A few lines further down the page of the book we read the old story – I mentally hear the ring of the rifle or gun – and in an instant a beautiful scene of Nature is ruthlessly dissipated. The frightened creatures fly hither and thither; what was but just now all happiness and quiet, resolves itself into bloodshed, turmoil and misery . . . Let a knowledge of the habits of an animal or bird be of far greater value to the sportsman-naturalist than the possession of its bleeding carcase.

It takes him only another eight pages to revert to type, uncritically recording how his late friend Dr Genzick of Vienna had killed a hippopotamus.

. . .The ball struck the hippopotamus full on the head, and he sank instantly to the bottom, where he kicked up such a turmoil that, as Genzick said, ‘one would have thought there was a steam-engine gone mad at the bottom
of the river'. However, the doctor never found the hippopotamus, though he hunted everywhere for him, but the next year he discovered his whitened bones upon a sand-bank some distance from the place where he had shot him. He knew it was the beast he had shot the year before, for he recognised the bullet he found in his skull as his own make.

This does not mark out either Buckland or Genzick as a moral degenerate. Even down to their inconsistencies, they conformed to the spirit of their age. Men with a true and affectionate interest in animals were a willing party to what any civilised person now would deplore as unspeakable cruelty. They saw no contradiction in this, still less hypocrisy, but only the hard demands of necessity. Even among their own kind, death was a frequent visitor who –
pace
Stamford Raffles – often called unannounced, and seldom with the clean finality of a bullet. Sentimentality was for novelists. If zoos and museums wanted animals, then someone would have to go and fetch them. Milksops need not apply. For a European or an American, just getting to Africa and surviving there would require both a rugged body and uncommon strength of mind. Add confrontations with snakes, insects and man-eating lions, and the necessary qualifications excluded all but the most determined of adventurers. I've seen no evidence that Frank Buckland himself ever strayed far beyond Paris, but this did not stop him from describing the dangers of further continents. Hippos in particular seemed to fascinate him, and he cites a ‘Mr Petherick' (presumably the Welsh mining engineer, explorer and collector John Petherick) as his source for a vivid account of the risks to men in boats. A hippo, he explains, will attack in one of two ways. In shallow water it will bound up to the boat, then ‘rise open-mouthed and
endeavour to carry off some one on board'. In deeper water it will drive at full speed underneath and use its head as a battering ram. Mr Petherick told him of boats being instantaneously sunk, and of a man being cut in two by the animal's teeth.