Part 11

To-day, though the public are ready to make the biggest elephant their greatest favourite, as in the case of the African “Jumbo,” the keepers and trainers have little to say in favour of his kindred. Their opinion seems almost as unanimous as it is hostile. At the Zoo it is said that the Africans are “stupid,” and therefore dangerous. For example, supposing an Indian elephant to be backing towards the wall, and so in danger of crushing its attendants, a push or a slap on its huge thigh will instantly be understood as a hint to move forwards, or to stop. The less careful African would probably take no notice of the warning, and the man must either slip on one side or be crushed. The trainer alleges that they have bad memories. This makes them uncertain performers in the ring. They will learn a few tricks without difficulty; but when called upon to show off in public, they are extremely likely to refuse their parts, and either to stand still, or bolt to their stable. There seems also to be a general feeling among circus attendants that they are unsafe. The fine young African elephant now at the Zoological Gardens has given far more trouble to its keepers than the two large Indian specimens during the far longer period of their sojourn in Regent’s Park. When quite a baby its obstinacy was as marked as their docility. The Indian pair would walk round the grounds with their keeper between them, the man placing a hand on each of their backs, and the two solemn little fellows walking in step on either side. The African would not even take the bath which most elephants look upon as one of their greatest treats in hot weather. He roared, and kicked, and made such a determined resistance that it was necessary to rig up a block and tackle, and haul him into the water. When there he sulked, and seemed prepared to undergo the fate of drowning rather than the humiliation of obedience. The recollection that you may bring a horse to the water but cannot make him drink, hardly expresses the feelings of his keepers when they realized that the tackle which is sufficient to haul an elephant into the water may be unsuited for hauling him out. Ultimately the Chinaman’s recipe for driving a pig—“If you no can pushee, no pullee, then try plenty stick,” was adopted with success. The African elephant’s “uncertainty” has one redeeming feature. It may shy or jib on one day, and get the better of its keeper for an hour or more, but he does not necessarily therefore lose prestige in the eyes of the animal, and can assert his authority next day unimpaired. An Indian elephant, if once the master in a deliberate act of disobedience, loses from that moment all respect for the man whom it has worsted. Inferiority in “parlour tricks,” and in comparative docility, does not excuse the strange neglect which the native species receives as a beast of burden suited for the work of African pioneering. Dr. Sclater, writing from the offices of the Zoological Society in Hanover Square, says that there have been African elephants in the Gardens of the Society for nearly twenty years, and that in his opinion they are quite as intelligent as those of the Indian species, though perhaps not quite so docile. He suggests that a _keddah_ of Indian elephants and their attendants should be transported to the East African coast, and that the Indian elephants should be used to capture and tame their African brethren. General Gordon, shortly before the disaster at Khartoum, wrote to Dr. Sclater advocating the employment of the elephant in Africa, and making inquiries as to its possibility. The size which the African elephant will attain under favourable conditions in this country is well illustrated by the case of “Jumbo.” When this elephant came to the Gardens he was about four feet high and weighed 700 lbs. At first he was troublesome, but after a short time became perfectly manageable, and grew very rapidly. This was attributed by Mr. Bartlett, in his remarks on a paper read before the Society of Arts in 1884, by Colonel Sanderson, to good food, and a daily bath in hot weather. In sixteen years he grew from four feet to eleven feet in height. By that time he was probably twenty-three years old. An elephant does not reach its prime till thirty-five, and Jumbo increased another ton after a year at Barnum’s; he was therefore probably not full grown at the time of his lamented death.

The reasons for his sale were not very clearly stated at the time of his transfer. The cause of sale, in the case of any animal, is never a point on which the vendor is anxious to dwell. “Sold for no fault, but solely because the owner is giving up hunting,” is the favourite formula at Tattersall’s; and an elephant which is leaving a zoological garden to appear in a monster circus might be supposed to be disqualified for service in the latter, if it possessed any vice which made it an undesirable inmate of the former. The inference is more apparent than real; for the harder work and exercise at Barnum’s could hardly fail to make a change in the impressionable elephant temperament. But a pleasing mystery surrounded the “deal.” The shrewd sense of Barnum himself nursed the growing excitement on both sides of the Atlantic with a genial dexterity which will ever be considered a masterpiece of management among the illustrious exhibitors of the future. The Society, on their side, kept their own counsel, and the sale of the big elephant was briefly alluded to in the report as “made for satisfactory reasons given by the responsible executive.” Neither did the price received figure as a separate item in the receipts. But as the amount credited to “Garden sales” exceeded that of the previous year by about £1800, we may assume that the sum paid by Mr. Barnum was well within that limit. A good authority informs the writer that the net payment was £1000. Meantime the “Jumbo boom” was immensely profitable to the Society’s revenue. The fees paid for admission to the Gardens rose by £5500 in the year, an increase which the Secretary’s report attributes to the “great interest taken by the public in the removal of a favourite animal.” The splendid new Reptile House, with its unrivalled facilities for observing the habits of the snakes, lizards, and alligators, was the result of this most welcome windfall. It was in fact the legacy of the African elephant to the Zoo.

The facts as to Jumbo’s state of mind were afterwards clearly given by Mr. Bartlett. During the last years of his life in the Gardens he became at times very excited, and terrified every one who came near him except his keeper Scott, who had extraordinary control over him. “Scott,” added Mr. Bartlett, “was a very curious man himself, and it was with the greatest difficulty that he could be persuaded to allow another man to assist him in the management of the huge animal. It was feared that if Scott fell ill, or were injured by the elephant, he would be entirely unmanageable, for no other man dared go near him in his house, though when out at exercise he was perfectly quiet. At night, however, he would tear about and almost shake the house down, and became such a source of trouble that the Council decided to part with him.”

He was quite tractable in Barnum’s show, and became the father of two little elephants. Scott went with him, and after his death in a collision with a locomotive, was offered the charge of a large stud of elephants which was shown afterwards at Olympia. But his sturdy independence rebelled against the wearing of “costume,” which Barnum’s feeling for the proprieties of the arena enjoined. Faithful to his old charge he mounted guard over the stuffed Jumbo, and preserved his hide from the knives of relic-hunting visitors.

In conclusion we may contrast the knowledge and skill shown in the management of Jumbo at a critical time, with the fate of an elephant which exhibited much the same symptoms, in the Liverpool Zoological Gardens, in 1848, before the present race of English elephant-keepers had been trained to their work. This elephant, like Jumbo, was said to be the finest in Europe. It cost £800 eleven years before its death, and was said to be then worth £1000. It had already killed one keeper, accidentally, as it was thought, but not long afterwards it struck down and crushed a second. Such was the panic of the owners, that two six-pounder cannon were bought from the Albert Docks, and set loaded opposite to the elephant’s house, in case it should succeed in escaping. As it remained quiet, two ounces of prussic acid and twenty-five grains of aconite were given to it in its food. As the poison did not seem to take effect, thirty men from the 52nd Regiment were ordered to shoot it. The first fifteen delivered their fire, and as the creature did not fall the next squad discharged their muskets, and the elephant sank dead with thirty bullets in his body, together with enough poison to kill a ship’s company.

It may fairly be claimed that we have made some progress in the management of the elephant in England, since the days when the owner of such a valuable animal was not only incapable of keeping it with safety, but ignorant of the means to kill it humanely. The average duration of their life in this country is now probably well over fifty years; and though this does not contrast favourably with the eighty years of the Indian studs, there is every prospect that it will increase. The office of mahout promises to become almost as hereditary here as in India; and while traditions of elephant management are handed down from one generation of keepers to another, so it is noticed that the new and acquired habits practised by the more experienced and sagacious animals are observed and copied by the young arrivals. The elephant is being slowly Europeanized.

WANTED—A NEW MEAT.

THE lack of variety in those meats which, whether flesh or fowl, must always form the ground-work and basis of an English bill-of-fare, is a want keenly felt, but most difficult to remedy. To judge from the list of fresh food which the improved transport of the last few years has made available for the London dinner-table, a natural inference would be that, so far as novelty has been studied, we had made provision, not for man as humanized by Schools of Cookery, but for a race of fruit-eating apes. We have a dozen new fruits, shaddocks, limes, custard-apples, bananas, pines, Italian figs, pomegranates, lichees, ground-nuts, gourds, water-melons, and avocado pears. But among the thousands of tons of foreign game imported yearly, there is hardly a beast or bird which may not be had in better quality and condition at home, except the prairie-bird and the quail; for those canvas-backed ducks which escape the keen search of the New York dealers and find their way across the Atlantic, alight only on the tables of City Companies and millionaires, like the caladrus of old, that appeared only at the deaths of kings. Yet there are probably twenty people in this country who have eaten canvas-backed duck for one who has ever tasted swan, or rather cygnet, the finest water-fowl for the table alike in size and flavour, a bird easy to rear, most prolific, rivalling even the breast of a teal, without the fatal drawback of that excellent little bird, that no one has ever been able to get enough of it. Even now, though so neglected by the world, swans may be had from the Norwich Swan-Pit for £2 each. They weigh some sixteen pounds, and with them is forwarded an ancient recipe for cooking them—“done into rhyme by a Person of Quality.”

Another “fowl” which was once reserved for the tables of kings, and is now hardly thought good enough for aldermen, is the peacock. What roast swan is to roast goose, such is roast peacock to roast turkey. Many owners of country houses who keep peacocks and let them run wild and nest in their woods and shrubberies, take little trouble either to fatten or cook the pea-chicks. If they did, they would perhaps take more pains to rear these birds for the table. The meat is very white, and of exceedingly fine and close grain, and has the true game-flavour, with none of the stringiness of the common turkey. The American wild turkey is, however, an even finer bird for the table than the peacock. Those which appear in the poulterers’ shops of London generally arrive in such bad condition from careless packing and refrigerating, that they are inferior to the domestic bird. But when allowed to run wild and nest in English woods, as is done on some estates, on its merits, and apart from any tricks of cookery, it is perhaps the very best land-bird that is available for food. The game-flavour is not too pronounced, but gives a character to the whole which is altogether absent in the tame black turkeys of the farmyard.

But flesh, and not fowl, is what is mainly desired to widen the possibilities of the dinner-table. Fatted swans, or peacocks, or American turkeys might be increased and multiplied without affording more than an occasional relief to the monotony of the _menu_ and the brain-searching of housekeepers. What is wanted is some new and large animal, whose flesh has a character of its own which would readily distinguish it from beef or mutton, and an excellence which shall make it independent of any special treatment in cooking,—something which shall combine the game-flavour with the substantial solidity of a leg of mutton. An increase in the quantity of venison reared in this country naturally suggests itself; and it is not impossible that, in neglecting the produce of our deer-parks, we are hardly less careless than in losing sight of the culinary possibilities of the swannery. Good doe-venison may be bought in the neighbourhood of some large parks at a much lower price than mutton; and the quantity of first-class venison which finds its way to London is surprisingly little, considering the number of parks and private herds in the country. It is objected that deer can never pay to fat for food, because the annual growth of their horns reduces them so much in condition as for a time to make the venison worthless. But this applies only to the bucks; stags might be kept like bullocks, and doe-venison might still be remunerative. As early as 1740, an enterprising Jersey squire, of the name of Chevallier, who had succeeded to an estate in Suffolk—whose descendants still constantly sit in Parliament—had formed a small park for fattening deer and sending them up to London. His accounts of the cost and profits of the enterprise are still preserved, and he abandoned the scheme, not from difficulties encountered in fattening or selling the deer, but because of the uncertainty of carriage to London. Venison, even when reared under the present unscientific method, or rather want of method, varies greatly in quality, that from certain parks being much superior to that grown on less suitable pasture; and it is not too much to hope that, if bred and fattened solely for the table, venison would be in demand as something more than an occasional luxury.

But swan, peacock, and venison are, after all, only revivals of the old bill-of-fare which was available in the households of Old England. To find a new meat, we must take stock of the world’s resources of animal food, and inquire, after due survey, if there does not still exist some neglected quadruped which will furnish what we seek. Roughly speaking, our main supply of animal food is drawn either from the rodents, the ruminants, or the pachyderms,—represented by the rabbit, the ox or sheep, and the pig. To vary the supply at our disposal, we shall probably not be able to go beyond these limits; for the general experience of civilized man has already pronounced judgment on the question, and science supports the verdict. It is no good to eat a wolf; for the wolf has already got the benefit of eating the lamb, and left no surplus for us. Of the three great tribes, the rodents may be dismissed from our search; for those that are not already used as food are either too small to be useful, as the lemming or the guinea-pig, or too repulsive in appearance, like the capybara, or in habits, like the rat. Of the pachyderms, we find only one which is domesticated for food—the dear, familiar Berkshire or Yorkshire piggie. The larger pachyderms are too big; the smaller, like the peccary, too savage; the wart-hog and other African varieties too repulsive. Clearly, then, we must have resource to the list of ruminants if we are to find one to add to the British bill-of-fare. At first, the choice seems wide enough. It embraces all the deer-tribe, the wild sheep and antelopes, goats and ibexes, which are numerous; but they all possess a rank and disagreeable flavour, which must prevent their coming into the list of first-class food. The possibility of extending the supply of venison we have already considered. The wild sheep would probably differ so little in flavour from mutton as to make it hardly worth while to domesticate them, though those of the Himalaya will breed freely in confinement. The antelopes and wild oxen, therefore, alone remain, and it is among their number that the animal wanted must be found, if it is to be found at all. If the accounts of African hunters are reliable, the venison obtained from the larger kinds of antelope found in South and Central Africa is really excellent, that of the koodoo, the oryx, and the eland being the best. Perhaps the highest modern authority on the subject is the opinion of Lord Randolph Churchill. Those who read of and sympathized with his account of his sufferings under the cuisine of the Cape steamers, must have marked with a feeling of relief, that in his letters to the _Daily Graphic_ he confessed to having made an excellent supper on stewed roan antelope. His verdict on the eland has not been given, but its flesh is said to surpass that of all other antelopes by as much as Welsh mutton surpasses Lincolnshire “teg.” Ten educated palates have pronounced it “peculiarly excellent, having in addition the valuable property of being tender immediately after the animal is killed, which makes it much appreciated in Central Africa, where the meat is usually tough and dry.”

In addition to the quality of the meat, the eland has the additional recommendation of large size. A full-grown eland is as large as a two-year-old shorthorn, and has far more the appearance of a high-bred Indian bullock than of an antelope. Its horns are short and straight, pointing backwards, and it has a dewlap like an ox. It can live on the hardest fare, and soon grows fat on good pasture. Best of all, it becomes quite tame, and is easily acclimatized.

When Lord Derby, the President of the Zoological Society, died in 1851, he directed that his herd of five elands at Knowsley should be given to the Society for use in their menagerie. They multiplied fast, and six fawns were produced between 1851 and 1855, and it was found that at two years old they stood thirteen hands at the shoulder. The protection necessary was not more than that usual in fattening fine cattle, and the Society resolved to sell their fawns for the experiment of acclimatization in English parks. Lord Hill bought a young male and two females for his large park at Hawkstone; but according to Whitaker’s _Deer-Parks of England_, none of these survive. The Marquis of Breadalbane also bought three. In 1861, twenty-one calves had been born in the Zoological Gardens since Lord Derby’s gift ten years before, and there is still the nucleus of a herd of their descendants at the Zoo, though their size and stamina is diminished by inter-breeding. It does not appear that eland breeding is now followed with much enthusiasm by the owners of large parks and chases, partly, no doubt, because the “shorthorn mania” was for a time such an absorbing pursuit among country gentlemen as to leave no thoughts for any other experiments.

It seems a waste of the resources of nature to allow these fine animals to be exterminated, as they soon will be, in our new African empire. The argument, that because South African negroes have not tamed them, we should not attempt to do it, is of little force. The African keeps cows to give _milk_; meat was supplied in inexhaustible quantities by the wild antelopes and other game, and with far less trouble than domesticated animals give, until the white man with guns destroyed them. We are too apt to forget that England owes the best of her trees, vegetables, and animals to other countries. All are now so good that we are prone to believe that neither can be added to or improved. Perhaps Admiral Rous was right when he declared that it made him “simply sick” when an Arab cross was proposed for our English thoroughbreds. But why should we not save the eland, the harness antelope, and the koodoo, and other large African species from extermination? America has almost allowed the bison to perish. Shall we not take warning, and preserve for our own use the splendid African antelopes, which, within the memory of man, were a thousand times more numerous than they are to-day?

AN EXPERIMENT IN ANIMAL PRESERVATION.

WHEN the founders of our Zoological Gardens formed plans for acclimatizing foreign animals in England, they could scarcely have imagined that the Gardens might form almost the last preserve of animals then living in enormous numbers in America. Yet it is not beyond the limits of possibility, that our Zoological Gardens may within a few years contain the last living specimens of the American bison. It is said that thirty of the surviving herd in Yellowstone Park were recently killed by poachers for the sake of their hides and horns, and the chances of their survival in the United States are thus further diminished. If they do not disappear altogether, it will be in a great degree due to an experiment in the preservation of wild animals and natural scenery, undertaken by a wealthy American, Mr. Austin Corbin.