Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History

Why the Rhinoceros Doesn’t Talk: The Cultural Life of a Wild Animal in America

10 8 On Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise, three animatronic men are forever chased up a palm tree by a rhinoceros whose sharp horn moves endlessly just out of reach of the lowest man’s bottom. Visitors to this ride float past harmless elephants who squirt water in the boat’s direction, playful gorillas ransacking a camp, and an intimidating herd of hippos who, despite the guide’s fearful warnings, do nothing but surface menacingly from the man-made lagoon. Since 1955, the Jungle Cruise has been an anomaly in the theme park. While other rides humanize animals, here they do not talk or sing. They resemble their wild selves in both physical form and behavior. The ride claims to represent actual geographic locations—the tropical forests of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Though there is a verbal identification of the continental shift, visually, the “jungle” itself is quite amorphous. Actors portray riverboat guides, adding spontaneity and human contact to the mostly robotic rides elsewhere. The jungle is too dangerous, it seems, to go it alone. Disney will send its visitors flying passively over the skies of Neverland, but an animatronic jungle is too much for a lone tourist. The interaction and “adventure” built into the narrative of this ride reveal a key to the mythology of the jungle itself. Tourism is essentially written into the experience of the jungle. Humans interact with wildlife in a seemingly “authentic” experience of a real but mythologized landscape with real but animatronic animals. The mechanized creatures in the Jungle Cruise represent animals in the Why the Rhinoceros Doesn’t Talk The Cultural Life of a Wild Animal in America k e l ly en r ight Why the Rhinoceros Doesn’t Talk 10 9 wild, not cartoons. Still, there is something not quite wild about these animals , specifically the rhinoceros. Those are no ordinary men up the tree but poachers; this is no ordinary ride through the jungle but one endowed with moral meaning. The wild, it implies, will turn on evil. Thus in Disney’s sole attraction about wild animals for nearly fifty years (until the opening of Animal Kingdom, which offers a similar morality play), they are feared and violent, yet know right from wrong. They, like their anthropomorphized cousins, have a moral order.1 Having lived with the memory of this ride since childhood, I was struck when I came across a description of a similar scene in an 1838 news story on the Indian rhinoceros.2 The report quotes a local informant’s “authentic” account of the animal, which is represented as evidence of the rhino’s wildness. How did this story survive for close to 150 years and become part of Disney’s iconic representation of the experience of this animal, not to mention of the jungle itself? In American popular culture, rhinos are few and far between, endowing such cameo appearances with added importance. When it comes to animals in the latter part of the twentieth century, Disney is a rich source of cultural meanings. The Disney theme parks and films mirror popular attitudes toward certain species. The Jungle Cruise reflects not only the myth of the rhinoceros’s wild violence but its continuing association with the image of an exotic natural landscape. From the earliest days of the rhino’s existence in the American imagination , this animal has embodied two elements—the wild and the mythic. Western theology of the early nineteenth century was characterized by a literalism that led biblical scholars to identify the rhinoceros with the reem, or unicorn: possessed of a single horn, solitary rather than social, strong, and randomly violent. Christian thought blended with science, folklore, ancient Roman texts, and Renaissance imagery to form an idea of the rhinoceros that exaggerated its savageness. Cultural perceptions of rhinos as aggressive influenced how these animals were treated in captivity and even determined for many years what was accepted as reliable scientific data about the species. These perceptions simultaneously reflected and reinforced the existing cultural construction of wildness as foreign and foreignness as wild. In the following analysis, I hope to show why Americans perceive the rhinoceros as quintessentially wild. I will argue that past cultural representations of the rhino have surrounded the biological animal with symbolism that expresses American attitudes toward its place of origin—the wilderness k e l ly e n r ig h t 1 10 of tropical forests. The...