The maddest thing I ever did was done under orders.
Pat Barker, Regeneration
Every creature in the world
is like a book and a picture,
to us, and a mirror.
Alain de Lille, c. 1200
What if Oliver had lived in the late nineteenth century instead of the early twenty-first? Victorian bystanders may have caught sight of him in full frothy panic at our bedroom window, confused him for a mad dog, and shot him on the spot. If he’d been born a few decades later, just after the turn of the twentieth century, newspaper reporters, dog fanciers, and sidewalk observers who noticed his jump from our apartment window might have chalked up his behavior to mortal homesickness or heartbreak.
The labels we have used for oddly behaving animals over the last hundred and firty years have often corresponded to the ones we’ve used for humans. Like our human diagnoses, they have never been stable. Veterinarians, zookeepers, natural historians, farmers, pet owners, and physicians have applied terms as old as hysteria and melancholia and as recent as OCD and mood disorders to other creatures. Diagnoses have come and gone like whalebone corsets and Elizabethan ruffs. That is, men, women, and other animals were stuffed into them, somewhat awkwardly, until another diagnosis that was more fitting or fashionable came along, one that people or their physicians felt was more representative of them or their animals.
Turn-of-the-twentieth-century cases of nostalgia and heartbreak, for example, unfolded alongside an increasing tendency to medicalize and treat mental health. As the century wore on, physicians who treated various forms of insanity became specialists and the process of therapy became more rooted in individual patient-physician relationships. By early midcentury, these physicians were known as “psychiatrists.”
Efforts to make sense of other animal minds often reflected these shifting ideas about human mental health. People use the concepts, language, and reasoning they have at hand to understand puzzling animal behavior. Disorders such as mortal heartbreak and nostalgia may sound quaint or old-fashioned today but contemporary Internet addictions and attention deficit disorders may, by the twenty-second or twenty-third centuries, seem antiquated. In this way, looking at instances of animal madness in history and how we’ve mapped ailments such as nostalgia, mortal heartbreak, melancholia, hysteria, and madness onto other creatures is like holding up a mirror to the history of human mental illness. The reflection isn’t always flattering.
For centuries, the genesis of madness in animals was confusing and hard to pin down. Even the word madness has meant many different things. By the sixteenth century, mad was a common word for “insane,” and by the eighteenth it became a standard term for “anger” in Great Britain and, later, in North America. In the second half of the nineteenth century and well into the early twentieth, any animal acting strangely or aggressively could be deemed mad whether or not he or she was rabid. It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century, and in some cases later, that mad animals were seen as victims of physical rather than mental disease.
Rabid dogs were especially terrifying because the disease was at first silent, sometimes incubating for many months in an exposed person, until it bloomed into excruciating pain and certain death. The disease was also scary because the main carrier, or at least what people thought was the main carrier, was man’s best friend. It is difficult to imagine today the fear of contagion present among city dwellers in the late nineteenth century. Dogs were not yet uniformly pets. Some were certainly closer to the coiffed and dominated denizens of our contemporary urban dog parks, creatures whose lupine tendencies have largely been bred into floppy-eared, doe-eyed obsolescence, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, dogs were much freer to roam and pursue their own interests, even if this came at the cost of mange, early death, or hunger. Their potential rabidity was disconcertingly present and more difficult to contain. A mad dog could be anywhere, and even though the fear was often disproportionate to the actual public health risk, it was real and paralyzing fear all the same.
The public’s anxieties about mad dogs were evident in inflammatory newspaper headlines: “Mad Dogs Running Amuck: A Hydrophobia Panic Prevails in Connecticut,” “Mad Dog Owned the House,” “Lynn in Terror,” “Suburbs Demand Death to Canines . . . Members of the Household Lock Themselves in Their Rooms While the Raving Beast Roams about the Halls.”
It wasn’t until Louis Pasteur successfully inoculated the first person against rabies in 1885 that widespread understanding of the disease morphed into biological narratives of contagion. Before Pasteur, rabies symptoms were often referred to as “insanity” instead of signs of infection. The historian Harriet Ritvo has argued that contracting rabies was not only thought to be bad luck, but was also considered a punishment that the infected animal somehow deserved and had brought upon itself by being unclean, engaging in sinful behavior, being overly lustful, or having too many unsatisfied sexual urges. In Britain, pets of the poor were considered especially at risk of madness, but so too were the pampered and seemingly corrupted pets of the upper classes.
Infection was also thought to jump from dogs to other animals or from other animals to dogs. Horses in particular were frequently bitten by vicious canines and then quarantined to await signs of hydrophobia. Sometimes they were simply shot. One early twentieth-century burro, bitten by a mad coyote, went on to kill a mastiff, bite a chunk out of the neck of a horse, and attack a party of miners in Death Valley. In 1890, a few hundred miles away, a mad lynx attacked a horse, killed one dog and beat up another, wounded several pigs, chased a herd of cattle, and was finally shot by a woman with a musket. Other cases concerned circus animals. In Chicago a little girl named Mabel Hogle was bitten by a monkey while visiting a museum of curios with her father. The monkey, reportedly foaming at the mouth, was assumed to be suffering from hydrophobia and killed.
Not all of these animals were rabid, however. Since so many people used the term mad to describe both rabidity and insanity, it wasn’t always easy to tell the difference. As early as 1760, when Oliver Goldsmith published the poem “An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog,” there was little distinction between being mad with rabies and other forms of insanity. The poem included the lines “This dog and man at first were friends / But when some pique began / The dog, to gain some private ends / Went mad, and bit the man.” This dog, fictional or not, was not rabid. He bit his human companion because he “lost his wits.”
Labeling an animal mad was not only a way of explaining irrational anger, it also described creatures’ strange behavior, aggression, or some other form of insanity, such as hysteria, melancholia, depression, or nostalgia. One small dog, for example, discovered with a pig on a shipwreck afloat in midocean in 1890 was said to have gone mad with loss. Animals could also go mad from a lifetime of abuse, such as Smiles, the Central Park rhinoceros, who reportedly did so in 1903. Maddened horses, as they were known, could simply take off running through Central Park or Williamsburg, Virginia, or anywhere at all, still attached to their carriages or dragging their riders behind, often with fatal consequences. Other horses, suffering from “equine insanity,” could, in a flash, turn on their grooms or riders and stomp them to death. Madness was also used to explain other seemingly bizarre animal actions. In 1909 Henry, the monkey mascot of a New Orleans baseball team, supposedly went mad when fans of the opposing team taunted him past his breaking point. He broke free from his cage at the stadium and climbed into the grandstand, creating a stampede and causing the game to be called in the seventh inning. As late as the 1920s and 1930s there were mad cats yowling in “madder orgies,” cows gone mad on the way to slaughter, at least one mad parrot, and some unruly Hollywood primates. In 1937, just a few months before forging an alliance with Hitler, Mussolini made international news when he was attacked by a mad ox during a parade to welcome him to Libya. He escaped unharmed and commended Libyans for their support of fascist Italy.
* * *
The attribution of madness to a variety of animals was widespread but many of the most enduring stories concern elephants. One early article typical of the mad elephant genre, published in the New York Times in 1880, told the story of an Indian elephant who one day began terrorizing nearby villages. Police who followed him found a trail of smashed buildings, trampled corpses, and a creature who doubled back to attack his pursuers. “[The elephant] was not merely wild—it was ‘mad,’ and as cunning and as cruel as a mad man,” relayed the reporter. “But insanity itself is a tribute to the animal’s intelligence, for sudden downright madness presumes strong brain power. Owls never go mad. They may go ‘silly,’ or they may be born idiots; but as Oliver Wendell Holmes says, a weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself.”
A year later, the Los Angeles Times published “Bad Elephants,” a rap sheet of elephants gone mad and bad. Mogul was killed in 1871 during an effort to subdue him, and an elephant named Albert with Barnum’s circus was shot by soldiers in New Hampshire after he killed his keeper. In 1901 Big Charley killed his keeper in Indiana by throwing him into a stream twice and then standing on top of him until he drowned. A few years later Topsy was electrocuted at Coney Island after killing three men in as many years, one of whom had fed her a lit cigarette. There was also Mandarin, Mary, Tusko, Gunda, Roger, and countless others who were shot, electrocuted, hanged, and strangled for striking out at their keepers, riders, grooms, trainers, or bystanders, often for very good reason.
While an elephant could theoretically contract rabies, most were not physically ill but more likely reacting against poor treatment and abuse. These mad elephants were newsworthy, not simply because they smashed buildings or cars or trampled people but because they expressed themselves in often spectacular ways—choosing particular individuals on whom to vent their anger or exact revenge, biding their time until they found the right, most devastating moment to act. Captive elephants have been known to suddenly explode into violence, going after their handlers, grooms, or trainers. This is so common that, since the nineteenth century, expressions like running amok came to characterize just this type of event. These accounts were commonplace in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and still appear in the twenty-first.
* * *
On August 20, 1994, in front of thousands of people eating cotton candy and peanuts, a twenty-year-old female African elephant named Tyke entered Honolulu’s Blaisdell arena, part of the Circus International show. She was wearing a headdress of golden five-pointed stars. Her trainer, Allen Campbell, wore a sparkly blue jump suit. Even on a shaky home video recording, Tyke seemed agitated. She began to turn in quick circles at the edge of the brightly lit ring. Campbell was frustrated and pushed and prodded her, trying to gain some control over the whirling elephant. She trumpeted loudly and knocked her groom, who’d been standing nearby, to the ground. Quickly, she bent down on her front knees and pressed him against the floor with the full weight of her body. Then she rolled and kicked him, like the lightest of logs, along the ground. This is when Campbell went after Tyke, trying to stop her. But she knocked him to the ground too and began to kick him more forcefully than she had her groom, pausing to sink down on her knees and smash him against the floor. As she stood back up, Campbell flopped to the side, limp.
“It looked like the elephant had a rag doll tied to her leg—the way the man’s head was moving,” said a woman who’d brought her daughter to the circus, in an interview for a special episode of the television show When Animals Attack. “Then people started panicking. The people closest to the ring began to realize that this was not part of the show. That something was wrong.”
After Allen stopped moving, Tyke turned back to her groom, kicking and rolling him across the floor one last time. At this point, Allen seemed either dead or unconscious. The crowd screamed and panicked. People began to run and push toward the exits of the arena. Tyke burst out of the building, throwing one of the heavy wooden doors off of its hinges and sending it sailing twenty feet. She headed into the adjoining parking lot, followed by a police car, and then into a nearby street, stopping traffic. More cops sped to the scene, dozens of cars converging on the streets around the arena, training their guns on Tyke.
Tyler Ralston was driving down Waimanu Street when he saw Tyke running toward his car. “Initially, I was confused,” Ralston told a reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser. “The elephant was coming at me and the police were behind it.”
He swerved out of the way in time to see Tyke chase a circus clown into a vacant lot while another circus employee tried to lock her in by closing a pair of chain-link gates. She charged through the flimsy barrier and into him, shattering his leg. Then the police started shooting. “That’s when I was, like . . . ‘I don’t want to see an elephant get killed.’ And the next thing I knew, it was running by me, bloody.”
The police shot Tyke more than eighty times. Of the men she went after, only her trainer, Alan Campbell, was killed. After news of Campbell’s and Tyke’s deaths began to spread, more of the elephant’s story came to light. According to USDA and Canadian law enforcement records, years earlier Tyke had been performing with another circus when her trainer was seen beating her in public, to the point where she screamed and bent down on three legs to avoid being hit. Whenever the trainer walked by Tyke afterward, she would scream and veer away from him. He claimed he was punishing her for trying to gore his brother. She had also escaped twice before. In April of 1993, Tyke charged through a door of the Jaffa Shrine in Pennsylvania during a Great American Circus performance—ripping off part of the wall (causing more than $10,000 in damage) and running onto an upstairs balcony. She was later coaxed back by her trainers. And in July of the same year, during a performance at the North Dakota State Fair, Tyke escaped from her trainer again, trampling an elephant show worker and breaking two of his ribs. Tyke belonged to the Hawthorn Corporation. The company, managed and owned by John Cuneo Jr., leased animals to circuses and other entertainment ventures around the world for more than thirty years—including Circus Vargas and Walker Brothers Circus. The company had a terrible track record of Animal Welfare Act violations. In 2003, the USDA seized an elephant from Cuneo. It was their first elephant seizure in history. Her name was Delhi and she was suffering from skin abscesses, lesions, and severe chemical burns; a trainer had soaked her feet in undiluted formaldeyde. A year later the USDA charged Cuneo with nineteen more counts of abuse, neglect and, mistreatment, and he was forced to relinquish his entire herd of sixteen elephants.
* * *
Outside of mistreatment, bouts of madness in male elephants may be, at least partially, explained by musth, a hormone-fueled period that can last weeks to months. A male in musth is considered more aggressive and stubborn, their penises may be erect, and a sticky substance leaks from the glands in their temples. Sometimes these males become violent; musth periods have been described as passing bouts of erotic madness.
Chunee, a once docile Asian elephant who lived at Exeter Change in London in the mid-nineteenth century, was killed when his annual attacks of “sexual excitability” made him too violent for the comfort of his keepers. His execution in March 1826 was gory and went on far too long. Chunee refused arsenic, three rifle shots only made him more upset, and repeated volleys of military muskets by a group of soldiers called in at the last minute couldn’t finish the job. Eventually a keeper delivered the final blow with a sword.
Gunda too was once an approachable star elephant at the Bronx Zoo just after the turn of the twentieth century. But he became, upon sexual maturity, “most troublesome and dangerous,” according to William Hornaday of the New York Zoological Society. His repeated, six-month “bouts of erotic frenzy” made him so violent that he was put under extreme restraints for half of every year. Debates over what to do with him captivated New Yorkers, and articles and editorials about his fate, the ethics of chaining him in place, and his possible execution peppered the New York press on the eve of World War I. In the end Gunda was shot point-blank in the elephant house by the famed elephant hunter and taxidermist Carl Akeley. His folded, dehydrated hide was taken to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where it remains today, stored on a large metal shelf underneath the Planetarium. Gunda’s execution for mad behavior was representative of many other elephants’ experiences, their rights to life hinging on how their sanity was perceived by the humans charged with caring for and confining them.
On January 1, 1889, an eighteen-year-old Asian elephant named Tip walked off the Pavonia Ferry onto Twenty-third Street in New York City. He was a New Year’s gift to the people of New York from Adam Forepaugh, a circus-owning competitor of P. T. Barnum and Ringling Brothers who’d made his fortune by selling horses to the U.S. government during the Civil War. Forepaugh’s shows included Russian acrobats and Wyoming cowboys, “comedian pigs, donkeys and canines,” bicycle battles, a Museum of Savage People and Living Freaks, a boxing kangaroo named Jack, and a white elephant known as “The Light of Asia.” The shows advertised elephants riding velocipedes on wires strung high in the air, walking tightropes, and knocking down human boxers. The shows also included Tip, but for some reason (Forepaugh called it generosity) the elephant was now being given to the city of New York to be its first publicly owned pachyderm.
Over the next few years Tip would become first a lovable celebrity, then an example of violent animal madness, and finally an allegedly unrepentant criminal who divided natural historians, big game hunters, and animal collectors, as well as thousands of New Yorkers, into vocal and impassioned camps. But on that New Year’s afternoon Tip seemed to be a peaceful elephant whose presence was about to turn the animal pens inside Central Park into a proper zoo. According to the man who was giving him away, Tip was “docile as a lamb.” He was also worth $8,000 and had been a star of Forepaugh’s elephant show. What the first few newspaper articles didn’t question was why Forepaugh, a shifty businessman who hired pickpockets to work the crowds at his own shows, would want to give up a healthy trained elephant worth so much money, even if it meant scads of good publicity. It is more likely that Tip wasn’t docile at all.
Forepaugh had purchased the elephant from the legendary animal collector and zoo man Carl Hagenbeck, who had himself purchased Tip from King Umberto of Italy. Tip was probably captured like other Asian elephants of the time, by being forcibly separated from his mother in the forest where he was born. Or perhaps he was born to a captive female and taken from her just after weaning. Either way, his early years and his long voyage first to Italy, then to Germany, and finally to the United States would have been difficult. He would have been continually separated from the people and other elephants he was familiar with. His diet would have consisted of hay, bran mash, or sometimes wine, not the grasses he was born to favor. He wouldn’t have been able to roll in mud and swim in rivers but would have drunk from a bucket or hose and spent long hours chained in place on hard-packed ground, perhaps swaying to relieve the pressure on his knees and ankles. He was trained under threat of beating, and the tricks, such as riding velocipedes, weren’t easy for an elephant to perform. When the adolescent hormones started flowing through his temples, stoking his desire for female companionship, Tip likely grew even more frustrated by his strict confinement.
For his first few years inside the Central Park elephant house, Tip’s life as an attraction was rather uneventful. But in 1894 the New York Times announced that Tip “must reform or die.” The article claimed that unless the elephant controlled his temper he would be killed and his bones sent uptown to the American Museum of Natural History. His keeper, William Snyder, was clamoring the loudest for Tip to be done away with, convinced that the elephant was mad and planning to kill him and that it was only a matter of time until he did so. Snyder was right. One morning, as the keeper went to feed Tip his breakfast, the elephant snapped the chains that held his tusks to the floor and hit Snyder hard with his trunk, knocking him to the ground, and then tried to stomp the life out of him. Snyder screamed, and a park policeman came running, dragging him away from Tip just in time.
The elephant waited three years to try to hurt Snyder again. One afternoon, before the keeper finished his work for the day, he went into Tip’s pen to add an extra chain to his already heavy manacles. Snyder immediately sensed that Tip was ready to attack but before he could jump out of the way, Tip swiped him with his tusks. The blow sent Snyder flying into the wall and the elephant quickly moved to gore the keeper while he lay prone on the floor. But Tip missed, hitting the wall of the pen so hard that the building shook. Snyder crawled to safety, and his hatred of the elephant hardened into resolve to see him dead.
The Central Park commissioners began a week of deliberation over what to do with the elephant. Daily newspaper articles covered his plight and the pros and cons of keeping him alive or killing him. Attendance at the zoo, concentrated in front of Tip’s pen, increased with the news coverage. The animal dealer Hagenbeck, who sold Tip to Forepaugh, was in favor of death. The commissioners weighed the loss of a popular zoo attraction against the gain of a great exhibit for the American Museum of Natural History. One commissioner noted that chaining Tip in place for five years might be the reason for his vicious temper but that he was so dangerous now there was no way he could be unchained. The debates revolved around two major questions: There was no record of Tip going after anyone besides Snyder, but would he? And could Tip be held accountable for wanting to kill his keeper in the first place?
Despite the newspaper claims that increasingly called Tip mad, he was probably more frustrated than insane. He almost certainly wasn’t rabid. He also may have been going through musth. Perhaps Tip grew so frustrated that he tried to change his situation. The most logical way for him to do this, he may have thought, was to kill the keeper responsible for his extreme restraints.
As the Central Park commissioners argued Tip’s fate, the public did as well. Echoing the reporter who claimed that elephants were intelligent enough to go crazy, people who saw Tip as smart and calculating called the loudest for his death. These death-for-Tip advocates clearly felt that in order to want to kill Keeper Snyder, that is, to plan it and wait for the perfect opportunity, Tip had to be self-aware and capable of reason. By calling for him to reform or die, they demonstrated their belief that Tip was intelligent and sane enough to be culpable for his actions. On the other side were newly formed animal rights groups and activists who urged the Park Commission to see Tip as a creature worthy of pity who should not be blamed for his behavior. This view is, in some sense, similar to today’s plea of insanity.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a new wave of animal advocates establishing societies and agitating for more humane treatment of certain kinds of creatures, including captive wildlife and domestic animals. Books like Black Beauty, first published in 1877, reflected these shifting attitudes about animal protection. In Tip’s case, the people who wanted him spared may also have believed he was too dumb to have gone insane in the first place.
On May 10, 1894, the Central Park commissioners unanimously decided that the mad elephant should die. They claimed that Tip had killed four men while he was with Forepaugh’s circus and had gone after at least four more in Central Park with the intention of murdering them. It also cited an escape attempt, his great strength, the flimsiness of the elephant house, and testimony from an employee of Barnum’s circus who said he’d always thought Tip was a danger to the public.
The park flooded with visitors, all of them assembled in front of Tip’s pen, paying their respects or perhaps hoping to catch a glimpse of his death. Photos taken outside the elephant barn that week show a sea of men in bowler hats and fedoras, dressed in dark jackets against the spring chill, looking expectant. The first execution attempt was a hollowed apple filled with cyanide. He refused it. He also refused cyanide-laced carrots and bread. Meanwhile thousands more people thronged the edges of the pen, waiting for something dramatic to happen. Representatives from the Natural History Museum who had brought rifles wanted to shoot Tip then and there, but the head of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals wouldn’t allow it. It wasn’t until Keeper Snyder showed up with a big pan full of wet bran that Tip succumbed. Snyder mixed capsules of potassium cyanide into the bran and rolled it up into a big ball. Tip ate quickly; within minutes he seemed agitated, and droplets of blood dripped from his mouth. He made a final, powerful attempt to escape through the back of his pen toward the green lawn of the park, snapping all of his chains except the one around his ankle. This last chain tripped him and he fell to the ground, trumpeting faintly as he died.
* * *
I went to the American Museum of Natural History 117 years after Tip’s death to look for him. After scouring the specimen acquisition books, heavy rectangular volumes with flaking red spines that document every animal, plant, mineral, and artifact donated to the museum since its inception in 1869, I found the entry for Tip. He arrived the day after his death in 1894 and became specimen number 3891. The official record says that 3891 consists of a skull and mandible. His tusks are stored inside the museum’s ivory vault. His skeleton is at the museum, too, though its arrival isn’t noted in the books.
A few days later I followed the curator of mammals up a slim metal staircase to the first floor of a storage space tucked under the eaves. “The Africans are here,” he said, “the Asians are upstairs.” He was referring to the museum’s collection of elephant skulls. Large and hulking, the skulls sit in trays along the floor, covered with plastic sheeting to protect them from roof leaks. The first two skulls whose tags I inspected belonged to a mother and calf killed by Teddy Roosevelt and his son Kermit in 1909.
On the second level, a single bulb hung from the ceiling. Every surface was covered with dust, so thick it looked like gray snow and had a similar muffling effect. A long row of skulls stretched the length of the floor, and more than a century’s worth of accumulated bone fragments rested between them, small shards of ossified jaw and eye socket. The tallest skulls reached almost to my waist. At the very end of the row, flush against the sloping roof, was Tip. His skull had gone bronze with age, and the cavities where his tusks had been were gaping open, as if in surprise. He had been there ever since a team of men dragged his body by horse cart to a nearby barn and, working by lamplight, finished skinning his body and cleaning his skeleton for display. As I looked at Tip’s skull, I thought about his trial in the park and then his long, strange tenure after death as a specimen. Tip was an example not only of Elephas maximus but also of the frustrated mind. He was deemed mad not because he was rabid or demonstrably insane but because he acted violently toward the men who sought to control him, keep him in chains, and diminish his sensory, social, physical, and emotional world to a small barn. His badness caused his madness, and his madness cemented his badness. Tip was a victim of the human tendency to punish what we misunderstand or fear. New York of the 1890s was a world in which elephants killed men out of vengeance and spite, and insanity could leap from animal to human. How Tip was treated for his behavior, his increasingly restrained world, and his eventual execution reflected the anxieties of the people around him who fretted about the causes of madness and just who was susceptible.
Other forms of infectious insanity plagued nonhumans too. Certain of these illnesses have gone extinct, the diagnostic equivalents of passenger pigeons or dodos. Two diseases in particular, homesickness and nostalgia, felled men, women, and a fair share of other animals, from aquarium-dwelling sea lions to pet ducks. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, homesickness was considered a physical illness like tuberculosis or scarlet fever. It was thought to weaken, kill, or even inspire suicide. The ways the disease manifested reflected the era’s fears about increasing urbanization and the isolation that recent city transplants, far from their families, often felt, the psychological trauma of war, and the new, widespread immigration made possible by train travel and steamships. The term nostalgia could be used interchangeably with homesickness, and both afflictions were considered potentially deadly ailments. During the Civil War, for example, Union doctors diagnosed five thousand men with homesickness, seventy-four of whom died of the disease. In some cases army bands were prohibited from playing “Home Sweet Home” out of fear that the song might inspire mortal cases of homesickness or nostalgia in the soldiers who heard it. After the war the diseases grew more commonplace as Americans moved from farms to cities and millions of immigrants from around the world flooded into the United States, many of them pining for home.
Certain groups of people, such as African Americans, Native Americans, and women of all races, were thought to be more susceptible to homesickness than white men, and many psychologists and social commentators argued that this must be proof of Darwinian evolutionary theory at work (that is, people who succumbed to homesickness were culturally underdeveloped and unfit for American society, which favored the adaptable and sturdy). One charity worker observed in 1906, “Nostalgia . . . is the first and most effective aid to the natural selection of desirable immigrants.”
Other creatures were caught up in ideas about loss, longing, physical deterioration, and evolutionary fitness too. Animals served as convenient mirrors for these sorts of preoccupations since many exotic species were also far from home for the first time. The same forms of transportation that made human travel possible on a previously unheard-of scale in the late nineteenth century also did the same for nonhumans. These animals’ behavior, once they arrived in their new homes, often reminded people of themselves.
A few floors below Tip’s final resting place at the American Museum of Natural History is the mammalogy collection. Its hallways look a lot like typical high school corridors lined with lockers. Instead of textbooks and algebra binders, however, they are stocked with gorilla skulls, orangutan skins, and tiny cardboard boxes of teeth organized by species. The smell of formalin billows out in faintly sweet clouds when you ease open the doors.
At the end of one row in the great ape section is a locker labeled “G. gorilla. Casts, Zoo. No data.” This is where John Daniel is. Or at least this is where the parts of him are that aren’t on display in the Hall of Primates, where his mounted and stuffed skin and glass eyes have stared out at visitors, in a kind of simian thinker pose, since 1921. The odd and surprising life of John Daniel, a western lowland gorilla captured in the forests of Gabon in 1917 and taken to London to live in the front window of a department store, is a true-life parable of the way that labels like homesickness and nostalgia were applied to other animals, and why, in cases like John’s, it may have made perfect sense.
John Daniel was a superstar. No one remembers him anymore other than a few circus historians and die-hard gorilla fans. (The latter have a name for themselves, gorillaphiles, and they sometimes vacation together, traveling around the United States to see zoo gorillas.) In the 1920s John Daniel was famous for his surprising mind and for upending what it meant to be an ape, a scientific object, and a circus attraction. His short, curious existence suggested to the Western world for the first time on a grand scale that gorillas weren’t bloodthirsty brutes but affectionate and intelligent creatures who thrived when treated with kindness and love and who were susceptible to the same emotional stresses suffered by humans when they were denied it.
John was captured in Gabon after his mother was shot by a French army officer sometime between 1915 and 1916. When he was roughly two years old, he was shipped to England in the company of a group of monkeys ordered by the British government for experimental purposes, and purchased by the animal dealer John Daniel Hamlyn. Working out of his shop in London’s East End, Hamlyn bought and sold exotic animals captured throughout the British Empire and is credited with inventing the chimpanzee tea party. These staged shows of chimps dressed in pants and shirts and drinking tea out of cups while sitting on chairs, were a fixture of Western zoos well into the twentieth century. Hamlyn was also said to have kept chimpanzees as children in his house, wearing clothes and eating at the dinner table with him and his wife. One of these chimps reportedly answered the door at Hamlyn’s shop and then trundled off to find a human to help the waiting customers. When the young gorilla arrived from Gabon, Hamlyn promptly named him after himself and sold him to the department store Derry & Tom’s with the idea that in a few months’ time he would make an excellent Christmas attraction.
A young woman named Alyse Cunningham and her nephew, Major Rupert Penny, spotted the gorilla in the department store’s front window. They were intrigued, purchased him soon after, and brought him back to their house in central London. The gorilla had a bad case of the flu, and Cunningham described him as rickety and underweight. She also said that he’d been lonely. “We soon found it impossible to leave him alone at night because he shrieked every night, nearly all night, from loneliness and fear!” wrote Alice.
She was convinced that his fears stemmed from his long nights at the department store, when he was left all alone after the salespeople went home. The staff told Alyse that he’d cry and cry when they started to pack up at the end of the day. Alyse and Rupert felt that John’s night terrors were contributing to his slow weight gain and sickly demeanor. They decided to build him a bed in the room adjoining Rupert’s. He loved this new sleeping spot and his nightly shrieking ended. He began to grow and put on weight.
Alyse’s goal for John was that he become a member of their family, as if he were a human child, and so she started teaching him how to brush his hair, handle a fork, drink out of a glass, turn the taps on and off, and open and close doors. It took him only six weeks to learn all of these things, and then he was free to roam about the house as he chose.
John was a picky eater. Alyse didn’t know this, but had he been with his mother, it’s likely he still would have been breastfeeding. Gorillas generally nurse until they are about three years old. John always wanted milk, a lot of it, and warmed on the stove. He was also quite fond of jelly, especially fresh lemon jelly. The gorilla wouldn’t touch anything if it had been sitting out a few hours, though he always had room for roses. “The more beautiful they were, the more he liked them,” wrote Alyse, but he would never eat faded ones.
John also loved to have guests and would become so excited around new people that he’d show off like a young child, greeting them at the door and taking them by the hand, leading them around the room in circles. He was fond of shutting his eyes and then running around, knocking into tables and chairs. According to Alyse, he relished taking everything out of the wastebaskets and strewing the contents around. When asked, he would pick everything up and put it back, looking bored.
One afternoon Alyse put on a light-colored dress to go out. John went to hop up into her lap as he often did, but she pushed him away and said, “No,” as she didn’t want him to make her dress dirty. Offended, he lay on the floor and cried for about a minute, then stood, looked around the room, and picked up a newspaper, spread it on her lap, and hopped up. The newsprint dirtied her dress, too, but Alyse was too impressed to care.
Stories of John’s exploits were covered in newspapers in England and the United States, and accounts of his humanlike nature intrigued famous naturalists like William Hornaday. As the director of the New York Zoological Society and the Bronx Zoo, he had been trying to secure a gorilla for New York City since 1905, when he received a letter from a young daughter of a member of the Zoological Society. “My father says I may give a gorilla,” she wrote to the director. “Please place an order for him. I would like to name him ‘Cheese.’ ”
Unfortunately for Hornaday, it wasn’t easy to purchase a gorilla that would live long enough to become a zoo exhibit. Before John Daniel, captive gorilla deaths were considered inevitable and chalked up to homesickness, nostalgia, or mortal melancholy. One of the few gorillas to live more than a few months was Dinah, a young female captured by Professor R. L. Garner, a popular naturalist and animal collector who was convinced gorillas could speak. On a trip to Gabon in 1893 he decided to test his theory. Garner set up a forest cage he called “Fort Gorilla” and moved in, waiting to be approached by a talking ape. When this did not happen, Garner befriended a chimp whom he named Moses and attempted to teach him to speak English. This, too, did not go as planned; Moses did not speak. Then on a subsequent trip, in 1914, Garner came across a baby gorilla he named Dinah and brought her back to New York. She was sickly but survived eleven months, long enough to be taken around the Bronx Zoo regularly in a pram, wearing a frilly white cap and red mittens. She supposedly liked to watch the buffalo.
John Daniel was the first gorilla that seemed to thrive among people and it surprised many naturalists that his fine health didn’t seem to be due to his diet, the temperature of his quarters, or any other physical aspect of his environment. Instead it appeared to be a result of his affectionate family life. This shocked Western scientists and zoo men in particular. Just three years earlier Hornaday had proclaimed that there was no reason to hope that a gorilla would ever survive in captivity. He believed that when gorillas were captured as adults, their “savage and implacable nature” made them impossible to keep and that even if babies could be “captured and civilized,” they were liable to die soon thereafter. John contradicted all of this by flourishing.
For more than two years Alyse and Rupert encouraged John Daniel’s development, challenging and stimulating his mind without teaching him any tricks. “He simply acquired knowledge himself,” Alyse said. They would take him as an ordinary train passenger, without a cage, chain, or leash, to their cottage in the country. He liked the garden and woods but was fearful in open pastures. He was also frightened of full-grown cows and sheep but was fascinated by calves and lambs. Occasionally, they brought him to the London Zoo to see the animals and to be marveled at by the other visitors.
John Daniel was growing and would soon become a large male gorilla, or silverback. Alyse and Rupert felt that a free-roaming three-hundred-pound adult gorilla would no longer be considered acceptable in public. John also couldn’t be left alone as he became an anxious mess, howling until his family returned. Alyse and Rupert tried to find someone to help look after him, but that proved to be impossible, as most people tried to physically discipline the young gorilla. According to Alyse, they never hit John: “The only way to deal with him was to tell him he was very naughty, and push him away from us; then he would roll on the floor and cry and be very repentant, holding one’s ankles and putting his head on our feet.”
Alyse and Rupert decided that they needed to find him a new home. It’s not clear why they weren’t able to locate a suitable spot for him in England, but what is certain is that a man appeared with an offer to buy the young gorilla, saying that he represented a private park in Florida where John would have his every need met and be able to live out his life in a garden. This was not to be. The buyer, they discovered too late, was a representative for Ringling Brothers Circus. In March 1921, John was put on a ship to New York City, where he was housed in the cold and drafty tower of the old Madison Square Garden building and put on display.
The first reports of John Daniel’s mental and physical deterioration appeared almost immediately upon his arrival in the United States. The New York Times reported that he was homesick and spending most of his time “sitting quietly in one corner steadily watching for some familiar face in the crowds that come to see him.” “It is only when Mr. Benson [the agent who had traveled with him from England] arrives that he shows any animation and then he reaches his fingers through the bars to shake hands with his friend.”
The loneliness and isolation John must have felt inside his cage at the Garden was probably crushing. First he’d been separated from his gorilla mother, then he had been raised like a hairy human child and, at four years of age, would have been developmentally like one. What John Daniel felt when he was taken from Alyse and Rupert is likely similar to what a human child of the same age would feel upon being separated from his parents and the only home he knew, to sit in a cold room with only the gaze of strangers to keep him company. John responded to English. He had culture. He knew a gorilla version of love and affection. He also knew a gorilla form of sadness.
Soon both circus-goers and the press reported that the young gorilla was literally dying of loneliness. Alyse set out for New York by steamship as soon as she realized what had actually happened to John, but she didn’t make it in time. Three weeks after John Daniel arrived in New York, he was dead. Reporters for the Times claimed that homesickness, confinement, and improper care did him in. At least one argued that he had actually died of pneumonia. Both things may be true, as John’s immune system was likely weakened by his loneliness and isolation. In the weeks before his death he had refused food and would crouch on his iron bed, covering himself with a blanket, facing away from the front of his cage and the crowds who came to see him. By the time the wife of one of the circus performers began to spend time with him, putting warm compresses on his forehead and giving him the attention he craved, it was too late. A Ringling employee who knew John said that he had been treated like any ordinary museum specimen and this was the problem: “I think myself that he might have lived if allowed to stick to his former habits.”
There was a reason that he’d been barred from his normal habits, and it was financial. In the three weeks that Ringling Brothers displayed John in New York, even considering that he was listless, sad, and staring at the wall—not the most cheery of circus exhibits—the company earned back the $32,000 it paid for him. Had he lived and continued to attract the same number of people, John would have earned the circus roughly $500,000 per year in the 1920s, more than $5.6 million today.
Alyse must have been devastated by the death of her beloved gorilla. And yet, her interest in the apes was undiminished. Shortly after John Daniel died, she purchased another baby gorilla, whom she named John Sultan. He too moved into her London apartment and country house, but this time she did not let him out of her sight. She signed a contract with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus to display the gorilla under the name John Daniel II, but she retained ownership of him and stipulated that she was always to be at his side. She also required that they stay together in hotels and that he travel by car, train, and ship, not in a crate like the other circus animals but next to her, in a passenger seat.
John Daniel II and Alyse arrived in New York City on April 24, 1924. He was three years old. Unlike the first John Daniel, who crossed the Atlantic in a cage in the ship’s hold, John Daniel II shared a stateroom with Alyse. Once they arrived, they stayed together at the luxurious McAlpin Hotel on West 34th Street and Broadway, where he was allowed to play on the rooftop for exercise. The gorilla was displayed at the circus like his predecessor, but this time Alyse was nearby and they went home together at the end of every day, in a taxi. He and Alyse also visited the American Museum of Natural History, where the young gorilla was, morbidly, shown the mounted body of the first John Daniel. The famous primatologist Robert Yerkes came to the museum that day to meet them, along with physicians from Columbia University and the famed big-game hunter and taxidermist Carl Akeley, who was responsible for the museum’s dramatic dioramas, including a mountain gorilla family, frozen before a misty painted volcano in the Hall of African Mammals. A New York Times reporter who visited John Daniel II at the McAlpin mused that “William Jennings Bryan has not called on the visitor but John certainly would have been a valued acquaintance for Mr. Darwin. He offers . . . ocular proof of everything Mr. Darwin has affirmed and Mr. Bryan denied.” The legendary Scopes Monkey Trial, in which Jennings Bryan would forcefully argue against the teaching of evolution in American public schools, would happen only months after John returned to England.
Throughout his tenure with the circus, traveling across the United States and then Europe, and his years with Alyse in England, John Daniel II was a playful, wide-eyed little fellow prone to “nervous tension” around too many people. He relaxed with the clowns in between shows, was gentle with young children, and only occasionally bit his mistress. Despite the attentions of a tropical disease specialist who served as his private physician in London, he died in 1927. I do not know what became of his body or if Alyse, well aware that her first gorilla had been mounted and studied, kept him for herself, buried in the fields near their country home in Gloucestershire.
Almost a hundred years after his death, New Yorkers can still visit the first John Daniel. His taxidermied body is inside a glass cabinet on the third floor of the American Museum of Natural History, next to Meshie the chimpanzee, another human-raised ape-child, whose “father” was the famous comparative anatomist and gorilla hunter Harry Raven. John has been there since his death and his tag, which reads “Gorilla gorilla,” says nothing of his remarkable life. Upstairs in the metal locker, where his skull and bones are stored, is a tiny orange tin with a handwritten tag. It holds his milk teeth. I believe this is the same little tin that Alyse must have stored them in while he was teething, and gave to the museum upon his death. The cursive handwriting is beautiful, painstaking. His teeth are small and only slightly colored with age.
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John’s life in England and his subsequent trip to the United States unfolded in the aftermath of World War I. The psychological effects of the fighting existed on a previously unthinkable scale: 3.9 million American men were in the armed services, and 72 percent of them had been drafted. Many soldiers grew homesick and had to be treated at the front for emotional problems. Persistent homesickness was not only dangerous on its own but thought to be an indicator of imminent nervous collapse or “emotional shell shock.” During the war era and for some time afterward, newspapers ran stories on homesickness or tried to raise funds to buy soldiers at the front musical instruments to allay their emotional pain. Homesickness and nostalgia were also used to explain desertion in terms other than cowardice. Away from the front, war brides suffering from homesickness gassed themselves or threw themselves and their babies into San Francisco Bay.
Homesickness was not a new affliction. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first mention in 1748, but a flurry of deaths by homesickness was reported around the turn of the century, and increasing numbers of cases were diagnosed during and after World War I. Country boys new to cities were thought to be particularly susceptible, but homesickness plagued many other people as well, from Geisha girls brought from Japan to the 1904 World’s Fair in Chicago to a man who was so homesick that he stole a parrot who spoke to him warmly.
Other animals were dying of homesickness and nostalgia too. One case in 1892 concerned a mule shipped by railroad to a farm near Independence, Louisiana. Three weeks later the homesick creature reportedly showed up back in Tennessee, having reportedly walked four hundred miles to return home. Dogs who whined with nostalgia made the papers in Chicago, and just after the turn of the century, Jocko, a monkey mascot of a U.S. Navy ship acquired during the Spanish-American War, was reportedly so homesick for his original Spanish crew that he tried to swallow poison. His death was attributed to fatal melancholia aboard the ship. That same year an African elephant named Jingo, who was being shipped in a wooden box from England to New York to replace Jumbo in Barnum’s circus, refused to eat and died on the boat. His body was heaved overboard and his death reported as a possible case of homesickness. And soon after John Daniel’s death, a young female mountain gorilla named Congo, who had been studied at great length by the primatologist Robert Yerkes, died at John Ringling’s estate in southern Florida. The New York Times mused, “What caused her death is unknown but it may well have been loneliness, a broken heart and the wistful desire for companionship of her own kind.”
Even birds were considered susceptible. Toward the end of World War I, the family of a young San Francisco boy moved from a house into an apartment, and he was forced to give up his pet duck, named Waddles. The boy took her to Golden Gate Park and left her there. After a few days of endless honking and searching, the San Francisco Chronicle claimed Waddles died of nostalgia for her lost companion. The story ran next to another: “Despondent over Wounds Soldier Jumps out of Window.”
John Daniel was afloat on an ark crowded with nostalgic and homesick animals who, like humans around the turn of the twentieth century, were finding themselves far from home and, perhaps, not finding the adjustment easy. The fact that animals could suffer from these diseases seemed to imply widespread acceptance of the idea that a mule, a gorilla, or another creature could have a sense of self and understand their displacement.
These reports of homesickness- and nostalgia-related deaths were also sometimes used to justify racial hierarchies that placed white men above everyone else—patronizing and unfair attempts to make some humans, and some animals, seem more emotionally fragile than others. Ota Benga, an African pygmy man brought to the United States in the early twentieth century and displayed for a time inside the ape house at the Bronx Zoo, was one example. He shot himself in 1916, in Lynchburg, Virginia. His death was held up as evidence of his inability to adjust to life in the United States, a result of mortal nostalgia and homesickness.
Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, another popular catchall diagnosis for puzzling behaviors and untimely deaths was heartbreak. Like homesickness or nostalgia, brokenheartedness was considered a potentially lethal medical problem that affected both humans and other animals. Furthermore, a broken heart was not merely bad on its own but was also thought to be a gateway problem that could lead to melancholia and other forms of insanity. One 1888 treatise on the subject proclaimed, “The asylums of this and every country are full of these mental wrecks occasioned by these emotional cyclones.”
Evaluated from a twenty-first-century perspective, many deaths attributed to heartbreak might have been suicides, but well into the twentieth century it was far more socially acceptable to attribute self-killings to heartbreak and, incidentally, much easier to collect life insurance on. Despite some skeptics’ pooh-poohing heartbreak postmortems, the press breathlessly reported the stories. There were lovers’ hearts that gave out at the exact same moment, or after one ran off with a younger paramour; bankers’ hearts that ruptured when markets collapsed or their investments tanked; mothers and fathers whose hearts broke when their children fell through the ice while skating or were hit by a train or were kidnapped. Even one of Brigham Young’s wives supposedly fell victim after he accused her of sleeping with another man. Sad veterans and vanquished generals succumbed, as did immigrants stuck in limbo at Ellis Island. Women whose husbands were serving time in Sing Sing and at least one Indian princess were considered heartbreak victims as well.
The diagnosis grew out of a complex moralizing, often about the risks of bad behavior or the cost of love. It was also a convenient way to explain strange behavior, a physiological rationale for emotional pain that hadn’t yet been medicalized into depression or suicidal impulses in quite the same way it would be later. And perhaps most critically, the stories were entertaining.
As with homesickness, the popular and sometimes the scientific press covered a menagerie of brokenhearted animals, many of whom were dogs. Canine death by broken heart wasn’t a new phenomenon. Loyal hounds who died of heartbreak and sadness when their owners or companions passed away have been celebrated and held up as ideals for human beings since antiquity. Greyfriars Bobby, a Skye Terrier, supposedly spent fourteen years camped out on the grave of his deceased master in Victorian Edinburgh until he died too. Other dogs reportedly passed away because an animal friend died first. In 1937, a German Shepherd named Teddy stopped eating when his horse companion died; he stayed in the horse’s stall for three days until he died himself. Horses were also supposedly done in by heartbreak; mules perhaps not. According to one World War I source, a horse stuck in a shell hole full of water “will strive and struggle to get out, until he actually dies of a broken heart. Not so the mule. He has no imagination and no such outlook on life. He calmly and philosophically lies in the shell hole until someone comes along and digs him out.”
Besides faithful dogs and other companion animals, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century stories of brokenheartedness centered around zoo and circus animals, possibly because these creatures also lived closely with people and weren’t destined for the dinner table. There may have been less incentive to recognize humanlike brokenheartedness in a future steak or chicken breast. Between the late 1880s and the mid-1930s, animals like Bomby, a taciturn rhino that lived in Central Park, a blind sea lion named Trudy, and an Emperor Penguin who refused to be force-fed after his mate died in Washington, D.C., were each said to have died of heartbreak. Wild animals were occasionally thought to suffer from mortal heartbreak too, but mostly in association with their capture. And the inability to keep many animals, from lions to songbirds, alive in captivity was ascribed to heartbreak well into the twentieth century. In 1966 a killer whale named Namu was the second orca to be caught alive. He was brought to Seattle’s Marine Aquarium, where observers watched him ramming his head against the side of his tank and screaming loudly, his calls sometimes returned by passing orcas in Puget Sound. He drowned after becoming tangled in a net, a death the New York Times chalked up to heartbreak. A calf that had just been captured in order to keep Namu company was sent to SeaWorld in San Diego instead. That calf became the first Shamu.
Plenty of twentieth-century zookeepers discussed the risks of loneliness, grief, and heartbreak in their charges and the physiological problems they believed came with it. Belle Benchley, director of the San Diego Zoo from 1927 to 1953, once said, “Solitude brings melancholia to the majority of animals. They pine away and die from sheer loneliness, which explains many of their strange friendships.” One of these friendships, at the Berlin Zoo in 1924, cheered a monkey from his melancholy. The keepers gave him a porcupine.
Until the exhibits were shifted around for renovations in 2012, the large mounted body of a male grizzly bear stood just outside the cafeteria at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. Visitors wandered past his glass vitrine on their way to buy soup and pizza slices, unaware they were passing a legend. Much cuddlier in death than he was in life, the bear’s taxidermied form is disturbing. It’s as if every ounce of ferocity was drained out and replaced with soda pop. His face is mounted in a loopy, awkward smile, the kind of strained grimace you manage when chatting with someone you’d rather be walking away from. It’s even worse, however, because bears don’t actually smile. The only honest parts of his mount are his claws, overgrown and curling under. He’s obviously a bear who didn’t walk much.
His name is Monarch and he has been on display at the academy ever since he died inside his cage in Golden Gate Park in 1911. In the 1950s Monarch’s mounted body served as one of the models for the redesign of the California flag. State legislators decided the bear on the existing one looked far too much like a hairy pig than a majestic figurehead. Since then, Monarch’s likeness has been duplicated millions of times, printed on everything from boxer shorts and bank logos to travel mugs and tattoos. Yet few people know the bear was an actual living, breathing, scratching creature; fewer still know he was once said to be suffering from the deepest ennui, at risk of dying from a broken heart.
The only known example of a California grizzly mounted for exhibit, Monarch is a shaggy metonym for the drastic ecological and social transformations that took place in the state before and after the gold rush and a bear-shaped metaphor for the changing attitudes of San Franciscans toward the wilderness that surrounded them until the mid-nineteenth century. Americans who shuffled past Monarch’s cage or read about him in the paper made sense of his behavior in ways that reflected the times in which they lived, just as they had with Tip and John Daniel. Monarch was an icon of a recently neutered wilderness, and the worries over his emotional health reflected society’s newly romantic attitude toward the nation’s wildlands—which had been increasingly “tamed” by the slaughter and erasure of Native Americans and fearsome predators like Monarch from the landscape.
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Until the latter half of the nineteenth century, the forests, meadows, and riverbanks of California were thick with grizzly bears. If you knew what you were doing, it was fairly easy to capture one. In 1858 a sheriff in Sacramento sold a wild grizzly for $15.50; a trained one went for $20.50. When the trapper George Yount arrived in California in 1831 and settled in Napa Valley, he said that the bears “were everywhere—upon the plains, in the valleys and on the mountains, venturing even within the camping-grounds, so that I have often killed as many as five or six in one day, and it was not unusual to see fifty or sixty within twenty-four hours.”
In the 1850s, Grizzly Adams, the famous bear hunter and showman, traveled with two trained bears, Lady Washington and Ben Franklin, and exhibited dozens more in a menagerie in San Francisco. Ben Franklin had been captured as a still-nursing cub, so Adams gave him to a greyhound dog who had recently had a litter of pups and made buckskin mittens for the bear’s paws so he wouldn’t hurt the dog. Benjamin nursed from the greyhound for weeks, until Adams started feeding him meat. Both bears traveled hundreds of miles with Adams, sometimes chained to the wagon, other times walking freely alongside, and occasionally inside the wagon with him and the dog. Lady Washington also carried a pack, dragged a sled, and moved timber, and both bears helped Adams hunt grizzlies and other game that they shared at mealtime.
Well into the 1860s captive bears could be found chained or caged at train stations, where they performed tricks or ate sweets and cakes fed to them by waiting passengers. One bear was said to have played the flute. People bought tickets to watch bears fight with bulls. Some Californians even kept them as pets. The actress and dancer Lola Montez chained two large grizzlies by the front door of her cottage in Grass Valley. By the late nineteenth century, however, the bears were few and far between. Those that hadn’t been killed had become more reclusive, and captive bears were harder to buy. The animals who, only a few years before, had been everywhere were now hunted almost out of existence.
William Randolph Hearst, the eccentric California newspaper magnate, watched shrewdly as the bears became ever rarer. He decided that he could exploit his readership’s interest in the impending extinction of such a charismatic animal. In 1889 he hired Allen Kelly, a newspaper reporter with a bit of hunting and trapping experience, to capture a grizzly bear as a mascot for one of his papers, the San Francisco Examiner, known as the “Monarch of the Dailies.” Hearst hoped that the tale of capturing one of the state’s last grizzlies would boost readership. He would name him Monarch, after the paper.
Kelly began his hunt in the hills behind Santa Paula in Ventura County, but the bears avoided his traps. A few weeks became months and still he had nothing. Kelly’s editor at the paper fired him, but he continued undeterred. A few months later a Mexican man trapped a large grizzly in the San Gabriel Mountains of Los Angeles County and offered to sell it to Kelly. The bear furiously tried to escape his wooden trap, biting and tearing at the logs, hurling his body against the walls. For a full week he raged and refused to touch food. It took an entire day just to chain one of his legs. Finally, the bear was hauled onto a rough sled to be pulled by a team of skittish horses. The rest of the long trip to San Francisco was made by wagon and then railroad.
Egged on by wildly embellished tales of his capture in the Examiner, twenty thousand people came to see Monarch on his first day at Woodward’s Gardens, an amusement park in the city’s Mission District. He was kept there, in a steel cell, for five or six years, until visitors lost interest in watching him. Hearst gifted the bear to the new Golden Gate Park in 1895. Shortly after Monarch arrived, the park commissioners were preoccupied with a number of more pressing issues than the bear, such as bicycles, new machines that the park leadership worried would frighten horses or lead to violent collisions. Monarch’s arrival took up a mere two sentences in the commissioners’ annual report. The large gift from the Examiner first “objected to his strange surroundings and tried to make his escape but now seems reconciled to his fate, and is a very popular attraction.”
Over time, however, Monarch was becoming depressing to look at. By 1903 he had taken to spending all day inside a hole he dug out in the center of his pit between two boulders. Lying inside this hole, he placed his immense head on his paws and stared blankly through the bars of his cage. He may have liked the cover the boulders provided from the eyes of visitors, or perhaps he enjoyed the coolness of the exposed dirt, but February in San Francisco is hardly hot, and it seemed to be evidence of a long, slow change in his behavior. The park commissioners declared that Monarch had not “been himself” for some time and seemed to be suffering from an extreme case of ennui. They also claimed that he might be grieving his old life as a free bear, living among other bears, and suggested that he might be at risk of dying of a broken heart.
Indeed, by 1903 this adult grizzly bear, whose natural range would have been dozens, if not hundreds, of square miles and whose diet would have included a variety of grasses, berries, rodents, grubs, fish, and occasionally big game, had lived for fourteen years inside a small metal cage and then a slightly larger but barren and barred one. The extreme change in his daily life from that of a free-living bear who hunts and forages for his meals to one of total confinement, a completely different diet, no exercise, an environment full of noisy humans, and only the occasional whiff on the wind of the park’s bison herd was probably enough to change his behavior. How passersby interpreted his behavior, however, often had more to do with themselves than with the bear.
San Franciscans wandering past Monarch’s cage in the park, reading about him in the paper, and attempting to make sense of his blank stare were also changing, or at least the world around them was. In the years leading up to Monarch’s capture and throughout his early years in captivity, vast numbers of new roads, canals, railroads, and steamships had been built. Whitney’s cotton gin and other recent inventions revolutionized agriculture. More Americans lived in cities than in rural areas for the first time in U.S. history, and those cities were proving to be disturbing places, brought to life in books like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, published in 1906. Western wilderness had given way to pasture, farms, grazing land, and bigger towns and cities; the buffalo had disappeared, packs of wolves thinned, and animals like the California grizzly went extinct. The nation’s native peoples, their populations decimated, were being moved off their remaining lands and could no longer stop development, mining, logging, agriculture, or the acquisition of grazing country.
These vast changes, along with intensive mining and logging and the growth of manufacturing, helped make the United States an economic powerhouse by the end of the nineteenth century. In 1896, seven years into Monarch’s stint in San Francisco, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced the closing of the American frontier. He argued that the frontier had not only made America different, it had made it better.
The country’s wildlands and wildlife had long been a badge of nationalistic pride to people like Thomas Jefferson, but it wasn’t until the 1880s and 1890s that a growing number of Americans began to feel that this source of pride might be in need of protection. While Monarch sat with his head on his paws in Golden Gate Park, John Muir traveled the state’s mountainous spine and founded the Sierra Club. Many people joined the newly formed Audubon Society, and Turner, Roosevelt, Muir, Gifford Pinchot and others lamented the loss of the country’s wild places and the possible effect this loss would have on the national character, a largely white and masculine affair. A flurry of new national parks were established, from Glacier National Park to Yosemite.
Nostalgia for the passing frontier inspired men who could afford it to turn to recreational camping, hunting, and other outdoor pursuits on estates in the Adirondacks or with guides on the Great Plains. In 1910, Monarch’s last full year in the park, Ernest Thompson Seton helped found the Boy Scouts of America in order to teach young boys frontiersmen skills and keep them from becoming too citified. Wealthy urban tourists and sportsmen visited the new national parks, complete with fancy lodges, resort towns, game wardens, and park rangers. Ideas of the American West became increasingly idyllic.
In order for this to happen, however, its history was sanitized. Places like Yosemite and Yellowstone could now be seen as antidotes to increasingly unhealthy and dirty cities only because the wilderness was no longer a place of war or suffused with animal predators. Wildlands could now be a place of renewal, at least for people of means. Efforts to protect and celebrate these places were an attempt, in some sense, to protect the origin myth of the United States and the individualistic frontiersman who brought it into being. There was no better figurehead for the contradictions inherent in this new idea of wilderness than Monarch. A once ferocious creature who could easily have eaten the average human visitor to Golden Gate Park, Monarch was now caged. His great bulk was reduced, his claws curled with disuse. Visiting him was entertainment, cheaper than a trip to a resort lodge in Montana. Since grizzlies were no longer a threat to Californians, Monarch could be a nostalgic, last-of-his-kind figure. The grizzly could be pitied. Noting his apathy, listlessness, and seeming sadness, the park commissioners ordered the capture of a female bear as a mate for the old mascot.
Unfortunately by 1903 there were no grizzlies left to capture in California, so a female bear was trapped in Idaho. When her shipping crate was unloaded into the enclosure next to Monarch’s, he stood up, tore at the ground, and sniffed at the air. One observer said that the new female “typified the saying ‘cross as a bear.’ She was ferocious and objected to photographers. . . . Perhaps old Monarch would better have gone on suffering from ennui after all.” Eventually Monarch and the Idahoan grizzly got along quite well. They mated, and just before Christmas in 1904, two cubs were born.
And yet the tinge of mental ill health associated with Monarch did not quite dissipate with the jubilant arrival of his “wife,” Montana, as she was called in the press, or the successful birth of their cubs. Just as people had seen humanlike ennui in Monarch, when one of the cubs died after only three days, the Chronicle now saw abusive behavior in his slatternly mate: “The poor little cub died from a combination of neglect and disgust for life.” It was a melodramatic story of an unnatural, selfish, and negligent mother who refused the baby any care or comfort. In actuality, however, the park officials who tried to rouse Montana to a sense of responsibility for her tiny, furry offspring had taken the cub from her. When he sickened and died, they reported that he had “fallen out of humor with existence.”
Monarch garnered less and less attention as the years wore on, with one exception. In the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake and the raging fires that reduced the city to smoldering rubble, a poster with an artist’s rendering of the bear, perched Godzilla-like atop the ruins of San Francisco with an arrow in his back and a snarl on his lips, urged residents to stay strong and rebuild their ravaged city.
Four years later Monarch was confirmed as the sole California grizzly still alive, captive or free, though he wouldn’t be for long. In 1911, after twenty-two years in captivity, Monarch was deemed decrepit by park officials and euthanized. It was announced that his skin would be on display at the park museum in time for Labor Day. His skeleton, minus much of his skull, which was included in his mount, was buried nearby. Later it was dug up, cleaned, and given to the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, where it remains today. Like John Daniel, Tip, and countless other animals before him, Monarch had become a specimen. Unlike John Daniel and Tip, however, Monarch had lived so long due to his own fortitude, good health, determination, and luck. He hadn’t thrived, exactly, but he had survived.
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One of my favorite books as a child was E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. The ranch where I grew up was home to Mac, the surly miniature donkey, but also barn cats, chickens, the occasional goat, a few rabbits, regular-size donkeys, and a pony named Midnight. I was convinced for much longer than I probably should have been that the animals gossiped and argued with one another whenever I was out of earshot. If I could appear slowly and silently enough alongside the donkey corral or behind the chicken coop, I thought I might catch them at it. I never did. But I was sure that if I had, I would have heard something like Wilbur, the talking pig, discussing heartbreak.
In a dramatic scene toward the end of the book, Wilbur is attempting to save the eggs of his dying friend Charlotte, a spider. He implores Templeton, the selfish rat antihero, to scurry up to the roof and rescue her egg sack.
“Templeton,” said Wilbur in desperation, “if you don’t stop talking and get busy all will be lost, and I will die of a broken heart. Please climb up!”
Templeton lay back in the straw. Lazily he placed his forepaws behind his head and crossed his knees, in an attitude of complete relaxation.
“Die of a broken heart,” he mimicked. “How touching!”
Even fictional animals had begun to get a bit snarky about the idea.
I can’t imagine what the veterinary behaviorist would have said if, over Oliver’s sore and bruised body after his jump from our apartment, I had asked how to treat his broken heart. The possible headline: “Rejected Lovesick Dog Jumps from Building to Search for Family; Pines Away for Months; Barely Survives 50-Foot Fall; Owners Despair over Vet Bills.”
Strangely enough, long after the first animals were said to be dying of heartbreak, the idea has stubbornly refused to go away. It still pops up from time to time, as a way of explaining mysterious animal deaths. And while most veterinarians would perhaps not choose to write “heartbreak” in their patients’ charts, tales of animals dying of exactly that exist alongside accounts of animals suffering from more modern afflictions like depression or generalized mood disorders.
In 2010, two elderly male otters who had been inseparable for fifteen years died within an hour of each other at a New Zealand zoo. Only one had been ill. Their keepers believed that the second otter died of a broken heart. The ethologist Marc Bekoff writes of animal heartbreak too. In The Emotional Lives of Animals he tells the story of a Miniature Schnauzer named Pepsi that a veterinarian gave his father as a gift. The dog and the elderly man became extremely close, sharing the same food, chair, and bed for years. When he was eighty years old, the father committed suicide. Pepsi grew weak and withdrawn; he never recovered after the death of his companion and eventually died. The veterinarian was convinced it was due to a broken heart; that is, the dog had lost the will to live after his human was gone.
In March 2011 another heartbreak story went pinging about the Internet. A British soldier with the Royal Army Veterinary Corps, Lance Corporal Tasker, was killed in a firefight in Helmand, Afghanistan. His dog, Theo, a Springer Spaniel mix who was trained to sniff out explosives, watched the whole thing. Theo wasn’t injured in the firefight, but hours after Tasker died, she suffered a fatal seizure, brought on, according to witnesses, by stress and grief over the loss of her companion.
These contemporary stories, like the earlier tales of animal heartbreak, are as much about the humans telling them as the animals themselves. We imagine ourselves inside the dog’s or otter’s head and heart. We make sense of their behavior by seeing our feelings and fears reflected in them. This is surely a kind of anthropomorphism, but it can also be a valid one. As humans, we can imagine fading and dying after we lose someone dear to us. Most of us know someone this has happened to.
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In the early 2000s, the UCLA cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz encountered her first cases of Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, a newly identified syndrome characterized by crushing chest pain and a severely abnormal EKG. She rushed her patients to the operating suite for an angiogram expecting to see blood clots or signs of heart disease, but there was nothing obstructing the coronary arteries. These men and women weren’t having heart attacks. The only abnormalities in their hearts were odd, lightbulb-shaped bulges in the left ventricle that kept the organs from making strong contractions.
Japanese cardiologists named the syndrome in the mid-1990s; the bulbous tissue reminded them not of lightbulbs but of octopus pots, the round ceramic takotsubo that Japanese fishermen use to catch the cephalopods. The flabby, ballooning area of heart muscle makes the ventricle contract unpredictably and weakly, pumping blood in intermittent spasms. This is the source of the chest pain in people who arrive in emergency rooms after coming down with sudden heart trouble. What surprised Natterson-Horowitz, however, was that Takotsubo wasn’t brought on by cardiac disease or congenital defects but by acute stress and emotional pain. Patients appeared at the hospital suffering from weak contractions after seeing a loved one die, before being sent off to prison, after losing a lifetime of savings, or having survived an earthquake. In Zoobiquity, the book she coauthored with journalist Kathryn Bowers, they write that this new diagnosis was proof of the powerful connection between mind and heart health, confirming a causal relationship that many doctors thought to be “more metaphoric than diagnostic.” She and Bowers point to a few fascinating public health statistics, such as the increased rates of heart failure among Israelis fearful of Scud missile strikes during the 1991 Gulf War—statistics that suggest that panic and dread of the strikes may have killed more people than the missiles themselves.
In the days surrounding the Al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11 there was a 200 percent increase in the number of life-threatening heart rhythms in American patients with implanted tracking devices. And in 1998, when England lost the World Cup to Argentina in a suspenseful last-minute penalty kick, heart attacks across the United Kingdom spiked by 25 percent in a single day. Since then, a number of other European studies have corroborated the relationship between spectactor stress and heart health. Ironically, games that end in “sudden death” shootouts seem to be particularly dangerous for fans.
In the spring of 2005, Natterson-Horowitz was called to the Los Angeles Zoo by the chief veterinarian to consult on an emperor tamarin named Spitzbuben with heart failure. The tiny monkeys all have dramatic, white Fu Manchu mustaches that make even the young females look like wise old men. Natterson-Horowitz was excited to meet one and made eye contact, trying to calm the primate as she would a human patient. The veterinarian stopped her, warning that she might give the tamarin “capture myopathy,” killing her before they even had time to intubate. When animals, particularly high-strung prey animals such as deer, rodents, birds, and small primates like Spitzbuben find themselves caught in the teeth of a predator, tangled in a hunter’s trap, or eye to eye with a veterinarian, for that matter, they’re flooded with adrenaline and other stress hormones. The overflow of these hormones is so powerful it can injure the pumping chambers of the heart; the contractions become so weak that blood stops circulating, and the animal can die. Capture myopathy was first identified by hunters more than a century ago. Big game such as zebras or moose sometimes died after a long chase even though the hunters hadn’t actually hit their targets. Since then, sudden death among terrified animals has been observed in every corner of kingdom Animalia—from Norway lobsters trawled from the ocean floor to wild mustangs terrorized by the Bureau of Land Management’s helicopter roundups, to a mid-1990s concert by the Royal Danish Orchestra, whose version of Wagner’s Tännhauser in a Copenhagen park caused a captive six-year-old okapi within hearing distance to anxiously pace, try to escape her pen, and then die. Her veterinarians cited capture myopathy.
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Looking at the different ways people have described emotional well-being and illness over the years offers something of a parallel history of how we’ve made sense of our own minds and hearts. They not only expose the futility of attempting to separate emotional trauma from physiology but also the impossibility of dissociating disease from history. Where earlier generations saw madness, homesickness, nostalgia, and heartbreak, veterinarians and physicians now see anxiety and mood disorders, obsessive compulsivity, depression, and capture myopathy. Similarly, debilitating fears of horse-drawn fire trucks or flickering gas lamps don’t scare many people or their pets today, but perhaps they once did.