Conclusion

Fighting nature explores performances that reflect human fascination with conflict and war and a human capacity for fighting and aggression; that is, aspects of human nature. The question as to why staged conflict and war were popular prompts a range of speculative responses, from spectator interest in political events to the attractions of viewing (and participating in) fights. Fighting and conflict consistently remain central to entertainment through cinema, although the staging of war re-enactments no longer needs animals after the 21st-century success of the theatre production War horse, with puppets for horses. The re-enactment of battles fought with live animals was a historical phenomenon. The war perpetuated on other species continues.

In examining 19th-century menagerie animal performance history, the brutal excesses in the treatment of animals are revealed as inseparable from the predatory behaviour of humans. The cruelty of depriving exotic wild animals of their habitat and of their freedom became compounded by the process of caging and restraining them so that they could live and travel among humans for their entertainment. The extent of that animal exploitation and the scale of the numbers captured becomes almost inconceivable.

Throughout the 19th century lion-tamer cage acts depicted physical handling, confrontation and fighting action in a progression towards animal submission. The possibility of animal attacks on human tamers attracted spectators, even though some expressed apprehension and conflicted reactions. The public attended menageries in large numbers in order to see shows that staged tamer fearlessness and bravery against a hostile nature that was embodied by the animals. By the mid-century leading menagerie acts had female lion tamers enter small cages to heighten an impression of danger and by the late 1850s, a hunting identity had been added to male tamer acts. Even in the instances where individual lions and tigers in leading acts showed qualities that suggested friendliness, these were overshadowed by a generalised perception of species aggression. It is this attitude that seems to have made the large-scale hunting of large animal species permissible.

The viewing space of the menagerie was one of suppressed violence and camouflaged human aggression. The open area occupied by transient menageries and the informal arrangements for viewing animals in cages or tied up seemed to facilitate spectators behaving in unpredictable and aggressive ways. Menagerie workers and exhibited animals became a stimulus for antisocial behaviour as locals taunted animals, caused fights, and even turned into violent mobs. Human societal problems and issues of cruelty to animals were difficult to separate from menagerie viewing, so the atmosphere was one of vigilance against attack, and animals resisting keepers as workers adopted defensive strategies. It was very large crowds that may have eventually forestalled spectator mistreatment. If ideals of kindness suggested the aspirations of those working with animals, the larger an animal the bigger the confrontation and struggle to keep him or her in the menagerie. The menageries treated some animals like prisoners of war and imposed physical tortures.

Menagerie animals travelled extensively. Species came from diverse locations in expanding colonial empires, shipped along global trade routes to colonial ports and transported over land to major centres. The transported elephants that appeared on British or European stages brought together ideas of colonial governmental and royal rule and the military occupation of far-flung regions. Individual animals implicitly embodied imperial connections and even a brief appearance legitimised the exoticism of a show’s location and theme. Depictions of foreign royals with exotic animals spanned socio-political hierarchies, and staged battles and wars in particular could make explicit power relations and global strategies of European dominance. Military identity in British popular entertainments delineated how the dominant values became embedded and circulated across entertainments. Thus individual animal appearances influenced larger cultural beliefs about militarisation and power that extended to other species.

Accounts of aggression towards other species, however, have a counter historical narrative by the late 19th century. Colonial authorities had implemented some protective legislation for animals by 1879 when it became evident that the slaughter of roaming animals through hunting practices was bringing about species extinction in some areas. In 1900 there was a conference in London of those concerned about the decline in the numbers of wild animals in Africa.1 By 1903 an alliance of hunters had been formed as the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire.2 Perhaps it was ironic that hunters should be the ones championing preservation and conservation, but they did at least appreciate the scale of animal disappearance, and it was in their interests for roaming animals to survive.

Hunter and hunting party guide Denys Finch Hatton brought this issue to widespread public attention in England in 1928 when he provoked discussion with an extended article in the Times. The first part of the article describes the innovation of driving by motor car with two trucks to find wildlife on the Serengeti plains for cinematic filming, with the camera fixed to the external side of the car. The group filmed 70 lions in two weeks and a diverse range of other wild animals. But in a final section headed ‘An abuse of sport’, Finch Hatton criticises the increasingly numerous ‘[s]hooting visitors to East Africa who are anxious to fill their bag as quickly as possible . . . most of them want to get a lion, and many of them do not care very much just how it is got’.3 While it was still arduous to venture there by car, he envisages that this motorised hunting would compound and greatly increase the process in the future. He calls on those of influence to bring about control of hunting quickly to maintain wildlife and he outlines an alternative future when ‘many more people would be willing to pay for the privilege of seeing lions and other game’ in the wild and ‘photographing’ rather than ‘shooting them’ from motor cars. If the hunter and the conservationist appeared to have a mutual aim of ensuring the survival of sufficient wild animals, those earning a living from organising big-game hunting tours for visitors were concerned and rightly so. Finch Hatton’s prophetic future of touring safaris photographing wildlife has been fulfilled but so too has his anxiety about animal species survival.

The information that there were limits on the large wild animals acquired by hunters for live exhibition was in general circulation in the first decades of the 20th century and arguments circulated in the press and in entertainment trade magazines. By the 1920s, animal business operators and trainers were aware that they could not rely on an endless supply of wild animals from Africa. A short report in the Billboard, the major trade journal for entertainers and show entrepreneurs in the USA, confirmed that the export of large numbers of animals was no longer feasible.4 The Congo Zoological Society meeting in Brussels had been informed that the 30,000 male elephants slaughtered each year in the Congo for their ivory tusks imperilled their numbers, especially as female and young elephants were also indiscriminately killed.

As uncertainty grew about the easy replacement of animals like elephants, the newer trained acts for the circus ring became more valuable. One consequence was that menagerie entertainment that simply presented the animals declined in status. It was possibly also because of the rise of photographic technologies that disseminated images. In the first three decades of the 20th century, touring menagerie businesses accompanying a circus became increasingly secondary businesses. Yet they still accompanied major circuses in Europe, the USA and elsewhere for pre-show viewing, with a diverse range of species that did not make the transition into the circus ring as performers. In Europe, Paul Eipper describes walking through Carl Hagenbeck’s circus menagerie in the late 1920s and entering where the ‘beasts of prey’ – ‘lions, tigers, the brown, polar, and Tibetan bears, the leopards, pumas, hyenas, and panthers’ – lived all year in sawdust-covered 26-foot (10 m) cage wagons; there were elephants with a matriarch, and in box stalls the ‘exotic creatures: buffalo, camels, donkeys, llamas, and guanacos, antelopes, reindeer, oxen, mules and goats’, then horses and a central display of monkeys and large birds.5 A hippopotamus had a water tank. ‘I smell the wild-beast smell, that savage, hotly acrid reek.’ He also outlines how the children of ‘exotic peoples’ in the circus, the Somalis and Hindus, sell postcards while the public visit the menagerie and there see the acrobatic feats of the Chinese children. Eipper’s commentary confirms that an exhibition of exoticism regardless of species continued well into the 20th century, a legacy of a previous era. Circus menageries continued to serve as touring zoos to the mid-century, emphasising values of human species dominance and forceful control.

From the mid-20th century, however, a very different struggle surrounded wild animals. It concerned the preservation of species increasingly threatened by human society and decreasing areas of habitat. The effort to overcome the historical legacy of 19th-century colonialism, war, and animal acquisition and transportation had turned into a major fight on behalf of nature to ensure the survival of threatened species. The legacy of 19th-century menageries’ entrenched beliefs regarding the human right to hunt and exploit nature through warlike practices against other animal species is yet to be defeated.