Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus by Susan Nance (review)

What defines the circus more than elephants? As Susan Nance writes in Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus, “The long nineteenth century of the American circus was equally the elephants’ long nineteenth century in America” (3). More than the roaring lions, spangled acrobats, or grinning clowns, the elephant in a jeweled headdress, trunk raised in salute, symbolizes the big circus. The contrast between its enormous body and its obedience to its trainer makes the circus elephant seem like an affable, doting grownup affectionately obeying the whims of a child. One of the strengths of this book is Nance’s ability to take this normative image of the circus elephant and turn it “inside out” (9), showing that what lay behind this genial icon was quite different. Nance argues that circus elephants’ living and working conditions deteriorated with the emergence of the modern circus and resulted in escalating conflict between elephants and humans. Though what she describes is often horrific, this is a story about elephants not as victims but as historical agents. Nance focuses the transformations stemming from the rise of industrial capitalism by describing changes in the circus business and their implications for animals, humans, and animal-human relations. While she frames this primarily as an American story, she also uses the fact that elephants were an imported species to set American industrialization in a global context.

The first elephant was brought to the United States in 1796 and others in the years following. These elephants were usually exhibited in small menageries with other rare or nonnative animals such as camels, polar bears, rhinos, monkeys, and tropical birds, but the elephants quickly became the star attractions. At mid-century, entrepreneurs P. T. Barnum and William Cameron Coup created the modern circus, combining these menageries with trick horse riding, animal acts, clowns, and sideshow exhibitions to create complicated organizations that toured the country by railroad. By that time, circus owners had come to believe that “no circus, however small could hope to survive without an elephant” (221). In the 1850s, they began an “elephant arms race” (146) of acquisitions that swelled the size of circus herds and dramatically changed living conditions for elephants.

According to Nance, conflict between humans and elephants was endemic from the beginning. However, despite the ignorance of their handlers and the handlers’ tendency to generalize from experience with horses and oxen, conditions had not always been onerous. Early menageries traveled by foot between venues, giving elephants ample opportunities for exercise, foraging, and exploration of the environment as they walked through the countryside. All of this would change with the emergence of modern circuses at mid-century. They were still mobile businesses, but now they involved moving ever-larger elephant herds long distances by railroad. While circuses were dependent on elephants, elephants were also their biggest problem. Maintaining and managing herds of twenty or more elephants on the move put enormous strain on circuses and worsened living and working conditions for the elephants. The methods used to train and control elephants became increasingly brutal. For example, unruly elephants were restrained and then beaten into submission by crowds of circus workers wielding sticks and pitchforks (121, 159). With little knowledge of their needs as a species, elephants were kept chained apart from each other, with legs hobbled and trunks restrained, preventing physical movement and normal social interactions with other elephants. Not unsurprisingly, elephant behavior became increasingly dysfunctional. In a downward spiral of violence, the terror, injury, and even death of the humans who worked with elephants led to ever more draconian methods of control. According to Nance, incidents of elephant-human conflict multiplied during the peak years of the circus between the Civil War and World War I, including some well-publicized killings of circus elephants. Yet circuses advertised images of elephants as both genial and savage to create a frisson of anticipation and dread for...