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c h a p t e r s e v e n Animal Cultures Lost in the Circus, Then and Now The genial circus elephant was a powerful mascot for the menageries and circuses in selling experiences of animal celebrity to a broad consumer audience in the nineteenth century. She was flexible, too, morphing from wonder of nature into various characters, some glamorous, some villainous, which served different venues simultaneously to make circus entertainment all the more meaningful to a diverse audience. Yet, her influence with ticket buyers meant that living elephants were a chronic expense and risk for the animal shows and both joy and terror to their employees. These elephants were uneasy inhabitants of the United States. Although many companies assured their customers that elephants were in essence native to the circus, the practical history of elephant management was more complicated. All the while, the circuses were consumers, not producers, of elephants, just like their customers. Nonetheless, the dream of a native-born American elephant population would inspire various conjectures about how the elephants that symbolized national ambition in the world of entertainment could be efficiently produced by the circus companies that employed them. As a possible “California Enterprise,” one newspaper speculated about Victoria and Albert, the elephant pair shipped to that state in the late 1850s: “Possibly they may be the foundation of a royal line of elephantine live stock, to be classed hereafter among the other products of California . Our climate is sufficiently congenial, . . . why not elephants?”1 A quarter of a century later, the situation for elephants in the wild—whether African elephants hunted for ivory or Asian elephants hunted for sport—seemed so dire that the question of American appropriation of these species had become far more urgent. “Are Elephants Dying Out of the World or Not?” asked the New York Sun in 1885. Only a few years have elapsed since the London Spectator declared it quite likely that if Jumbo attained the natural limit of his life, 150 years, he might be the last of his race on the globe. The production of the 1,200,000 pounds of ivory used in England alone every year necessitates the death of 30,000 elephants and from various causes Animal Cultures Lost in the Circus, Then and Now 209 the annual death rate of this most interesting of quadrupeds is estimated at not less than 100,000. Breeding in captivity must then be depended on eventually to propagate the species, and how far successful this has been may be inferred from the general rejoicing among show people when at rare intervals a baby elephant is born.2 Although the old canard of elephant longevity was in evidence here, the author was right to note that the ivory trade was destroying the African elephant population in those years. The Sun writer also voiced a circus-friendly message, which zoos and animal amusement parks often evoke today with their exotic animal breeding programs. Specifically, he implied that foreign peoples could not be trusted to manage their animal populations and that Westerners should take over this responsibility, even if in practice it was exorbitantly expensive and produced captive animals who would only be shadows of their wild kin, unable to practice or pass on the cultures their ancestors had devised over the centuries to thrive in their native habitats. This was a kind of zoological colonialism by which wild animal keepers, then and since, assured their customers that circuses and zoos could be trusted to deliver wild animals to the public conveniently, safely, and cheaply. Thus did the circuses argue that the privatization of wild animal populations was progressive and that consumers could help animals by paying to see them held in captivity. Further, read the New York Sun story again and note that the author asked readers to consider “the general rejoicing among show people when at rare intervals a baby elephant is born.” Here he referred to the two celebrated baby elephants of the late Gilded Age, Columbia and Bridgeport, both female. Columbia was the first elephant born in America, and she arrived on March 10, 1880, at her company’s winter quarters in Philadelphia. Her story would captivate the public with the tempting possibility that showmen could create an indigenous American elephant population. She was birthed by a dam called Hebe, a Cooper & Bailey Company elephant in her mid-twenties, and a bull of similar age, known alternately as Mandrei or Mandarin. Animal trader James...

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