Table Of ContentTHE ANIMAL G AME
The Animal Game
Searching for Wildness at the American Zoo
Daniel E . Bender
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
22001166
To Piya and Jo
Copyright © 2016 by Daniel E. Bender
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First printing
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bender, Daniel E., author.
Title: The animal game : searching for wildness at the American zoo / Daniel E. Bender.
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016017880 | ISBN 9780674737341
Subjects: LCSH: Zoos—United States—History. | Zoos—Employees. | Wild animal trade—History. |
Endangered species—History.
Classification: LCC QL76.5.U6 B46 2016 | DDC 590.73—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017880
Contents
Introduction: The Zoo Parade ............................. 1
1. The Elephant’s Skin: Animals and Their Visitors................ 15
2. The Voyage of the Silverash: The Big Business of Tropical
Animals................................................. 51
3. Jungleland: The Money in Wildlife ...........................82
4. The Monkeys’ Island: The New Deal Builds a Modern Zoo .......115
5. Aping: African Animals on Zoo Stages ....................... 143
6. Don’t Feed the Keepers: The Labor and Care of Zookeepers...... 177
7. The Zoo Man’s Holiday: Adventuring for the Zoo.............. 201
8. My Animal Babies: Caring for Endangered Species ............. 237
9. Dangerous Safari: Conservation at the End of Empire ........... 272
Conclusion: Searching for the Yeti .........................302
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323
On Zoo Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .373
Illustration Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .383
Introduction
The Zoo Parade
We found the prints in the wet Indian jungle loam. We are in
search of the rare Asian rhino to capture for an American zoo. In
the mud we see the heavy imprint of a three- cloven hoof. It must be our
prize. We are finally on the game trail, but our two biggest challenges still
lie ahead: how should we capture our prize, and how should we bring it
back alive?
My six- year- old daughter and I talk it over. We decide that a metal trap
could never hold an angry, panicked rhino. Finally, we decide to dig a
mud pit—s uccess! Braving torrential rains, we have hauled in our first
catch, but how should we bring it home? Rail is just plain silly, and we
chuckle at the idea of a rhino in an airplane. We decide to send him by
ship. The rhino arrives alive, and this is lucky; many animals perished on
the way from jungle to zoo. We are off in search of a tiger next.
It was all just a game—t he animal game—t o those Americans who for a
half- century made their living collecting the world’s animals to sell to
zoos and, in the process, entranced ordinary adults and their kids with
the excitement of jungles and veldts. For my daughter and me, it’s an old
board game I purchased while tracking zoos and their animals as they
evolved over the past century. She and I trap animals for American zoos
2 Introduction
while playing the 1954 Marlin Perkins’ Zoo Parade game. Her grand-
parents tell her how they remember waiting for Perkins each week on
television.
By the 1950s Perkins was a household name, a “zoo man” and a celeb-
rity. Perkins was born in rural Carthage, Missouri, in 1905, and by the time
young Marlin was my daughter’s age, he had begun his own private
menagerie, collecting insects and reptiles. Like many early zoo officials,
his love of collecting led him to university. For Perkins, that was the
University of Missouri, where he intended to study zoology. Also like
many zoo workers, he never finished and instead found a job at the lowest
rungs of the St. Louis Zoo. While he swept the pathways of the recently
constructed zoo, his zeal for snake collecting caught the attention of
George Vierheller, the zoo’s director. With a flair for the spectacular,
Perkins— the first to turn the forced feeding of pythons, the only way they
would eat, into a public event attended by hundreds— was launched on a
career. He went on to direct the Buffalo and Lincoln Park Zoos before
returning to St. Louis as Vierheller’s obvious successor. Along the way, he
turned the drudgery of zoo work into televised animal adventures, first
with Zoo Parade (1945–1955) and then Wild Kingdom (1963–1984). He
lent his name, his job, and his thirst for adventure to the board game we’re
playing.
You can play the game as well. (I put it online: https://digitalscholarship
.utsc.utoronto.ca/ZooParade/) The game is just like the zoo. It’s sup-
posed to be educational, but it appeals because it helps us imagine
encounters with wild animals. To collect your animals, you must first
answer three questions about their habits and habitat. Does the zebra
make a “loud snort”? (Yes.) Is the rhino’s horn made out of hardened
hair? (Also, yes.) Then, trained, you are in the field, facing the tests and
hardships of the animal game. Is “freshly killed game” a sign of a lurking
tiger, or do claw marks scratched on a tree suggest an elephant? (Yes and
no.) As well, the game is supposed to replicate the thrills and dangers of
the tropics. The animal is frightened or has escaped a poorly chosen trap.
(Go back two spaces.) A storm crashes through the jungle. (Go back and
choose a new trail.)
Experience, as did so many Americans who played the game in the
1950s, the dubious thrills of “bringing ’em back alive,” and ask the same
Introduction 3
question my little one did: where do all those animals in the zoo come
from today? In fact, they asked the same question in 1905. “Are you fright-
ened, Winnie?” asked Aunt Jane when they entered the zoo’s tiger house
(so the children’s storybook Trapping Wild Animals went). “No, auntie,”
he said, “I was wondering how they caught those big wild tigers.” Tigers
stumbled into traps, she said, and hippos, like rhinos, blundered into pits.
Of course, there was more little Winnie needed to know: “What’s the
jungle, auntie?” Simple enough, it was a large forest “where the men who
catch animals” lay their traps.1
We’d give different answers today. Perhaps we might talk about spe-
cies survival or explain the idea of “endangered species.” Maybe we’d
head to the zoo to see newborn tiger cubs. It’s still front- page news when
cubs are born. Just sixty years ago, the arrival of a newly captured rhino
sent reporters scrambling to meet its boat. The men and a few women
who captured wild animals became celebrities, America’s best- known
adventurers, even if today they are mostly forgotten. The world has
changed and the animal trapper, American, African, or Asian, is a poacher,
not a filmmaking hero. Winnie needed reminding that tigers live in India.
My little one knows that, but she also knows that really there aren’t
many left.
In 2013, my daughter joined 181 million visitors who go to (accredited)
American zoos. I take her because, like so many other children, she wants
to go. Almost a third of all zoo visitors are children.2 She wants to see the
same animals she hugs in her sleep: an elephant she calls Ditto and a tiger
she calls Little Tiger. She also enjoys the tender moments when animals
seem cute and cuddly. Once in the Bronx Zoo we paused by the Père
David’s deer and I explained that they were very rare, alive only because
they were among the first species American zoos deliberately bred. She
seemed more interested in a mother deer playing with her foal. More
often, though, she rushes past the slow, somnolent animals. She and I joke
about what it would be like to own a pet hippo, but she never wants to
visit the hippo exhibit. She paused only briefly at the new display at the
St. Louis Zoo, my childhood hometown, where you can watch the hippos
walking under water. She always likes the giraffes, but I have a hard time
enticing her into a reptile house. The big apes are slightly unnerving.
When she was very young, she dashed into my arms, frightened when a
