The Hunt for the Golden Mole (7 page)

Good intentions were no guarantee of a humane outcome. In January 1867 Frank Buckland visited Charles Jamrach – a well-known and reputable London animal trader who counted many zoos among his clients. In Jamrach's shop Buckland noticed the skulls of two Indian rhinoceroses. How had his friend come by these? It was a terrible story, which began when Jamrach sent his son to India to pick up a pair of rhinos and
bring them alive to London, where they would have had a value of £1,600 (£151,699 in today's money). The first part of the enterprise went well enough. Jamrach Junior successfully acquired the animals and, with forty coolies hauling on ropes, walked them 200 miles to be loaded on the
Persian Empire
, probably at Calcutta. Along with them went food sufficient for 120 days. This should have been enough, but for reasons not explained the voyage was protracted far beyond its normal duration and the animals starved. ‘The poor things were reduced to such extremities that they ate sawdust and gnawed great holes in a spare mast,' wrote Buckland.

A French collector, Jean-Yves Domalain, reckoned that ten animals died for every one successfully shown in a zoo, a figure that is impossible to verify but which seems unlikely to have been far wrong. Not all the stories were as harrowing as that of Jamrach's rhinos. Buckland gleefully quotes letters from correspondents describing how monkeys in Brazil and Abyssinia fell for the temptations of alcohol. In the Brazilian case the preferred tipple was cane rum; in Abyssinia it was beer sweetened with dates left out in jars for the animals to help themselves. ‘Monkeys certainly will get as drunk as men if they get the chance,' observed Buckland's informant, a Mr J. W. Slade.

The American hunter Frank Buck describes a crafty variation of this trick practised by Malayan natives on an orang-utan. They began by leaving a small tub of water under the animal's tree. The orang duly examined this, and then overturned it. For two more days the exercise was repeated. The tub was refilled and the orang knocked it over. On the fourth day came the breakthrough – instead of spilling the water, the orang drank it. Its capture now was all but assured. After a few more days of water, the Malays began to add increasing amounts of the native spirit
arrack
, until eventually the tub was filled with neat
alcohol. After downing this, the orang lurched around like a music-hall drunk, beat his tree with a stick and fell down insensible. ‘When he came to, some hours later, he found himself neatly crated at Jesselton [now Kota Kinabalu] awaiting shipment to Singapore.'

But Domalain's Law is no respecter of ingenuity or patience. Frank Buck bought the giant orang – the biggest ever caught – from its captors and sailed off with it for San Francisco and the Ringling Brothers Circus. Knowing his business, Buck took good care of his investment, which was given a roomy cage and fed on carrots, sweet potatoes, bananas, sugar cane, boiled rice, raw eggs and bread. But knowing his business also meant that Buck could face up stoically to disappointment. With about five days of the voyage remaining, the orang went down with dysentery. The ship's doctor struggled to inject a serum but the patient – ill-tempered at the best of times – snapped off all the needles. That night the Rajah of All Orangs, as the Malays had called him, lay down and died.

This was the way it had always gone; the way it always would go.

Like any other traded commodity, animals were bought and sold in a competitive market with dominant market leaders. The earliest and greatest of these was Carl Hagenbeck of Hamburg, born in 1844, the son of a fishmonger who also bought and sold wild animals. It was enterprise on an epic scale. According to Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier in their exhaustive history of world zoos, in the twenty years from 1866 Carl Hagenbeck shifted 700 leopards, 1,000 lions, 400 tigers, 1,000 bears, 800 hyenas, 300 elephants, 70 rhinoceroses, 300 camels, 150 giraffes, 600 antelopes, tens of thousands of crocodiles, boas and pythons, and more than 100,000 birds. Hagenbeck might have been a big player – Phineas T. Barnum was one of many
bulk-buyers who depended on him – but he was still only one dealer in a worldwide market that reaped animals like corn. And of course you cannot have corn without chaff. If you multiply the live deliveries by the Domalain factor of ten, then the true cost in lives rises from the epic to the biblical.

Journeys were dangerous, arduous and long. Seasick animals kept in small cages buffeted and drenched by rough seas had only the slimmest chance of survival. ‘Tossed about without protection for their claws,' wrote Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier in
Zoo: a History of Zoological Gardens in the West
, ‘big cats tore themselves to ribbons and bled to death, or put their own eyes out.' But the casualty rate only added to the value of specimens that were delivered successfully. For a consignment of three African elephants in 1870, an American dealer paid Hagenbeck £1,000 – the equivalent of £100,800 in 2012. Hagenbeck at first thought he had made a pretty good deal. ‘But it seems I was wrong. For my American friend took the animals to his own country and sold them for £1,700, £1,600 and £1,500 respectively.' At 2012 values, the dealer's £3,800 profit stacks up to £383,040.

But Hagenbeck reckoned himself to be more than just a money-maker. ‘My enthusiasm for my own calling originated more, if I may say so, in a love for all living creatures than in any mere commercial instincts . . . I do not intend to imply that I have not also had an eye to the main chance; but I can, I think, say with perfect truth that I am, and always have been, a naturalist first and a trader afterwards.'

There are good reasons to raise an eyebrow at this generous self-assessment, but Hagenbeck is entitled to some credit for thinking ahead of his time. The zoological park he founded at Stellingen has good claim to be regarded as the first modern zoo. Unlike others of the time it allowed animals to move about
with relative freedom in enclosures that bore some resemblance to their natural habitats. ‘I desired above all things, to give the animals the maximum of liberty. I wished to exhibit them not as captives, confined within narrow spaces, and looked at between bars, but as free to wander from place to place within as large limits as possible, and with no bars to obstruct the view and serve as a reminder of the captivity.' Artificial mountains were thrown up for chamois and ibex. ‘Wide commons' were provided for animals of the plains, and glens for the carnivores, kept apart from the public by trenches. Modern zookeepers may have improved upon this example, but none has ever expressed a more enlightened view.

To modern ways of thinking, Hagenbeck's opinions on animal intelligence could seem anthropomorphic, but at least they encouraged compassion. ‘Brutes, after all, are beings akin to ourselves. Their minds are formed on the same plan as our minds; the differences are differences of degree, not of kind. They will repay cruelty with hatred, and kindness with trust.' This led him to reject the old, barbaric methods of training circus animals through threat of pain. He records with revulsion the sight of four ‘trained' lions offered for sale at auction in London whose whiskers had been scorched off and who were ‘frightfully burned about their mouths'. By example at his own circus in Hamburg, Hagenbeck taught the world's showmen that rewarding an animal was a better way to secure its obedience than punishing it for error. Typically, he did not underestimate the importance of his own achievements: ‘There is probably no sphere in which the growth of humanitarian sentiment has been more striking than in the treatment and training of performing animals.'

Typically, too, he did not neglect the bottom line. He looked for profit not just in promoting circus performances of his own
but also in supplying trained animals to showmen such as Barnum. Like all enterprises involving the transport of animals, a circus was no place for the risk-averse or the overly sentimental. You might not use the whip or red-hot iron, but the animals were still exposed to hazards against which they had no defence. Hagenbeck himself put together a mixed troupe that included twelve lions, two tigers, several cheetahs and three bears, which he intended to present at the Great Exhibition at Chicago in 1893, and which, after months of preparation, made its debut at Crystal Palace in 1891. All the animals then became ill and died later in Germany of the glanders (an infectious disease usually caused by contaminated food or water), which he blamed on ‘the bad meat which was supplied by the unscrupulous contractor in England'. What is bad for animals is seldom good for humans either – a fact that would strike worldwide terror in the early twenty-first century when a global pandemic of avian or swine flu was thought to be only a matter of time. In 1892 Hagenbeck's menagerie was hit hard by cholera, which then spread to the unfortunate people of Hamburg. Even this disaster, however, gave him an opportunity to teach the world a lesson. ‘How true it is that cholera is spread through the agency of foul drinking water, was clearly demonstrated by the fact that after the veterinary surgeon had ordered the animals to be given boiled water only, no more of them were attacked by the disease.'

But the vision of Hagenbeck as some kind of latterday St Francis still doesn't quite ring true. One might reasonably ask how all this empathy with creatures whose ‘minds are formed on the same plan as our minds' would be reflected in his principal business as an international trafficker of wild animals. The answer suggests an ironclad moral constitution as well as an unsuspected gift for understatement. ‘Unlike the hunter, who
is attracted only by the love of sport, the animal trader goes to work. He goes, not to destroy his game, but to take it alive; and consequently not the least of the difficulties with which he is beset is the discovery of some practicable way of bringing back his booty to civilisation. As a rule, every foot of the arduous journey is attained only at the expense of some loss to the caravan.' But of course the losses begin long before any caravan gets under way. From Hagenbeck's own account we can see the full and bloody explanation for Baratay and Hardouin-Fugier's statistics of mortality.

First, the animals had to be tracked down and caught. For reasons already explained, capturing dangerous species such as elephant or rhino meant pursuing the young and killing the adults that protected them. Not all were cleanly shot. Hagenbeck describes the method traditionally practised by Nubian swordsmen on horseback, which at least had the merit of spreading the danger more equally between the hunters and the hunted. Indeed, the men deliberately invited bull elephants to charge at them. This was as ingenious as it was dangerous, and relied on deep understanding of the animals' behaviour. Success depended on all but one of the hunters riding dark-coloured ponies. Crucially, the last man was mounted on a grey. As Hagenbeck explains, ‘The attention of the elephant, whose sight is not good, is attracted by the colour. Upon the grey pony, the mighty creature usually directs his attack.' All then depended on the rider's skill. His job was to flee, but not so fast that the angry elephant lost hope of catching him. He had to keep tantalisingly just out of reach, the bait in the trap. His companions on the dark ponies meanwhile would close in on the elephant from behind. ‘Whoever reaches him first springs from his pony, and delivers a dexterous blow with his sword on the left hind leg of the animal, which cuts the Achilles tendon . . . As the
elephant hastily turns to avenge himself upon this new enemy, it becomes the turn of the rider who was formerly being chased to stop, dismount and with a similar blow on the right hand leg to lame the animal on the other side, so that he is totally disabled. If the blows have been delivered with sufficient skill and force, the arteries of the hind legs have been cut, and the elephant bleeds slowly but almost painlessly to death.' In the kingdom of the weasel, that ‘almost' reigns without peer.

For giraffes and antelopes the technique was easier. By putting entire herds to flight, all the hunters had to do was wait for the calves to exhaust themselves, when they were easily caught and tied. The hunters would take along a herd of goats to supply the young captives with milk, though this would not prevent more than half of them from dying on the journey. Other species such as hyenas and cats were caught in pits or traps. Hagenbeck took particular pleasure in the method for capturing baboons, which reversed the normal practice of focusing on the young. This time the targets were the highly aggressive tribal elders – dangerous, dominant adults who monopolised the food and who, like villains in a fable, would have their greed turned against them. The first job was to persuade a troop to congregate at a place of the hunters' choosing. This involved blocking all but one of their regular drinking pools with thorn bushes, then baiting the last one with
doura,
a primitive form of sorghum which the baboons particularly enjoyed. Then a trap had to be made. This was like a conical native hut, strongly made from stakes interwoven with branches. Once the baboons had settled down, it was carried to the drinking hole, propped up on one side and baited with
doura.
A cord ran beneath the sand from the prop to the hunters' hiding place. ‘Then comes the tragedy. A blazing noonday sun drives the thirsty baboons chattering down to their drinking-hole. Some of the biggest males, who
have already secured a monopoly of the
doura
, enter the trap, and commence their feast. The hunter awaits his opportunity: it soon comes; a tug on the cord, the trap closes with a bang, and three great baboons are fairly caught.'

So far so good, but luring them into the trap was the easy part. The ‘really critical and dangerous part of the performance' was to get them safely out again and render them harmless. The hunters had to move quickly, or the powerful baboons would smash the trap to pieces. First the men would thrust long forked stakes through the walls and pin the animals' necks to the ground. Then the cage would be lifted off and the prisoners trussed. Hagenbeck, as ever, delights in the detail. ‘First their jaws are muzzled with strong cord, made of palm strips; then hands and feet are tied; and lastly, to make assurance doubly sure, the animal's whole body is wrapped up in cloth, so that the captive has the appearance of a great smoked sausage! The parcel is then suspended from a pole carried by two persons, and conveyed triumphantly to the station.' In this case the ‘differences of degree' between the animal and the human mind were held to be somewhat extreme. Hagenbeck believed baboons to be exceptionally stupid, as well as unattractively violent and ungenerous to ‘their women'.