O texto a seguir é de autoria do Dr. Robert Young, um renomado biólogo britânico que faz pesquisas e trabalha com comportamento e bem-estar animal. Robert é docente na universidade de Salford no Reino Unido e o foco de seu trabalho é na conservação da vida selvagem, seja com pesquisas de cunho mais básico ou aplicado, com variadas espécies de animais.
Like most people who research animals, in the last 18 months, I have been able to do very little work observing live animals. Due to the lockdown in the UK, I have not been able to travel to do fieldwork and the zoos in the UK have been closed for most of the time. During this time my wife, who is Brazilian, has developed an interest in genealogy and has been busily tracing my ancestors through Scotland and Ireland, and her ancestors back to Italy. One of the things that has made her research easier is the number of databases of old records that have now been digitised and are online. This made me think, perhaps, I could do the same thing about animals, especially zoo animals.
As my teenage children are always telling me to do when I have a doubt, I did indeed ‘Google’ old databases about natural history and to my pleasant surprise, I found a great number with millions of digitised documents. This has now become something of an obsession, and I now have postgraduate students analysing some of these digitised resources. Online you can find everything from the complete archive of all the documents of a closed down zoo (e.g., Belle Vue Zoo, Manchester which opened in 1836 and closed in 1977) to hand-written records of fur trappers in Manitoba, Canada from the 1800s. Obviously, I have been focusing on zoo records because zoo animal behaviour and welfare is one of my research interests.
The number of surprises in these documents was great. Like many researchers, I had read about Victorian period animal dealers such as Carl Hagenbeck and Charles Jamrach, but it took reading the original documents for the scale of what they did to really make me pay attention to their impact on wildlife and zoos (most of the animals were captured to be sold to zoos or private collectors). There are two examples that really illustrate the scale of the animal trade in Victorian London. In 1889, Brookes Soap (which used monkeys in its advertising) decided to put on a ‘Great Monkey Show’ at Alexandra Palace in June 1889 to promote their products. In one month, John Hamlyn (animal dealer), was able to acquire 1,020 primates for this show, which included monkeys from all over the world and apes such as orangutans. John Hamlyn comments that during the 3-month monkey season in India around 5,000 monkeys were transported each year to Europe. The second example involves a play called ‘Arctic’ staged at the London Hippodrome in 1909. The London Hippodrome had a medium sized semi-circular pool in front of its stage. In the play, a shipwrecked sailor has a fight with another sailor over a woman, whilst being surrounded by 70 polar bears. Of course, in the play the polar bears are in the pool in front of the stage. One of the few wild animals that really terrifies me is the polar bear because they see humans as food. The polar bears for this play were supplied by Carl Hagenbeck and shipped over to London from The Netherlands for the play.
The previous two examples really illustrate the scale of animal trading at this time in history. Most of these animals were wild caught. Analysing stocklist records from the Zoological Society of London at this time period (1832 to 1900) makes for depressing reading. The annual death rate of animals in London Zoo at this time was typically thirty-three percent and, in some years, as high as forty-five percent. In fact, even until the 1950s the death rate of primates was twenty-five percent annually. Obviously, the zoo tried to breed animals but, in general, this was not particularly successful. The records at London Zoo in Victorian times show a breeding rate of around three percent per year. This was often due to success of breeding one or two particular individuals or species (e.g., tigers, hyenas and giraffes). However, breeding did not mean that the offspring survived, for example, lions bred very well but most of the litters developed the disease ricketts. The problem was so pronounced that London Zoo asked a surgeon for help in 1889, John Bland-Sutton, who treated the cubs successfully with goat meat/bones and cod liver oil. This treatment is recognised as the first experiment involved in developing a cure for the debilitating disease, ricketts.
I found a record that London zoo had bred, in Victorian times, one of the species used as a classic example of animal extinctions, the passenger pigeon. Two other classic examples of recent animal extinctions, the quagga and the thylacine were also held at London zoo but did not breed. The animal dealers acquiring replacement thylacines for London zoo comment on how rare they were becoming due to persecution in their native Tasmania. This meant the animals cost thousands of pounds to buy but the possibility of them going extinct was not mentioned. Of course, individual animals, of certain species, were being sold by dealers for thousands of pounds in modern money. For example, the first okapi in a zoo (Antwerp, Belguim in 1919) would in today’s money have cost more than U$150,000, and the poor individual lived for only a few weeks. Other animals were of course much cheaper between 1915 and 1920, John Hamlyn sold grey squirrels for people to release in their gardens and local parks for one British pound each (around £60.00 today). Today this species is a widely spread invasive species, which is responsible for the decline of the native red squirrel in England. Ironically, it was the 11th Duke of Bedford who was one of the people responsible for spreading this species (releasing them in his estates and giving them to friends as presents). The Duke of Bedford is well known for being the president of the Zoological Society of London, and for his conservation work saving the Pere David’s deer from extinction (1894 onwards).
After having read all this information, I became interested in the capture of the animals that ended-up in the Victorian zoos of Europe. Historical documents show that around fifty percent of the animals died at capture. Normally, the offspring of animals were targeted for capture, and this often involved, at least, the killing of the mother. Shipping records show that around fifty percent of animals died on the journey to Europe, and death rates of up to ninety-four percent were recorded. The preferred animals to transport were the offspring of large herbivores because their dietary requirements were easier to meet on a boat journey of several months. Often, these wild juvenile herbivores were accompanied by dairy cattle to provide milk for them. On occasions animals such as beluga whales were transported from the Canadian Arctic to London on a bed of seaweed and were regularly doused in seaweed on the journey. The first case was in 1877 to the Westminster Aquarium in London and the animal survived only four days.
It is interesting to put these numbers in context, so, if a hundred animals were attempted to be captured in the wild only twenty-five would make it alive to a European port. Of these twenty-five sold to zoos, after one year in captivity, only around seventeen would be alive. The survival rate is obviously horrendous. One other thing strikes me about these numbers, which is that this whole process was, probably, a massive biological filter. It may have been the less fearful animals that were captured and survived the transport, and then adapted successfully to living in captivity. Of course, it is now impossible for us to test this theory, but we do have evidence from modern research on small cat species that those who were friendlier to humans were, historically, more likely to breed. It is interesting to note how many times the old documents talk about these wild animals in zoos as if they were ‘big pets’ and their friendly disposition to humans. This could, of course, just reflect the animal husbandry of the day.
In terms of animal husbandry my dives into these digital archives uncovered a book published in 1892 titled, ‘A hand-book of the management of animals in captivity in Lower Bengal’, by Ram Bramha Sányál. I had never heard of this book before, which I now feel embarrassed about because this is the first zoo animal husbandry book. The book is full of a wealth of knowledge as its author was a zookeeper who kept records of his daily activities and used them to write the aforementioned book. Species by species the book details the needs of the different animals including their housing, diet, longevity and treatment during illness. The surprising thing was the knowledge in terms of providing what we would call environmental enrichment. For example, in the information about orangutans, the author talks about providing toys (e.g., balls) and mirrors. In the case of another primate species (Hanuman langurs), the author notes that they must kept in large groups or they pine away.
One of the things, I also found very interesting in all these old documents was the attitudes of the animal dealers. For example, John Hamlyn who sold a great variety of wild animals from his shop in London writes with great disdain in his magazine (1915-1920), ‘Hamlyn’s Menagerie Magazine’, about the fur trade in London and questions whether there will be any animals left in the wild. In one case he publishes information about a fur auction in London, where shockingly 180 leopard skins were for sale amongst thousands of squirrel, beaver and seal skins. This really puts into perspective the trade in wild animals for zoos from 1800 to the 1920s. It should also be noted that it was not just zoos but some private collectors such as (Lionel) Walter Rothschild had substantial collections of wild animals, for example, he owned over sixty cassowaries during his life. Around 1910 about a quarter of the animals held in London zoo were owned by Walter Rothschild (he deposited them there for his research). The animals were originally kept on his family’s estate in southern England until some escape and attacked his father.
History means knowledge acquired by investigation, and I hope to have shown you that despite not being able to observe animals in the wild or a zoo, it is still possible to investigate animals. It is important for us to learn the lessons of history, so that mistakes are not repeated. In terms of good starting places, I recommend the website ‘archive.org’ or ‘www.biodiversitylibrary.org’, however, there are many other online digital databases and archives to be explored. This whole experience of diving into the world of animal history has been both fascinating and productive for me at a time when I felt very frustrated by the restrictions imposed on me by the pandemic.