In the archive of Carl Hagenbeck’s Tierpark (Animal Park), which opened in Hamburg in 1907, there’s a outstanding {photograph} of some thousand tortoises in two giant pens. They weren’t an exhibit, however they offer us a glimpse behind the scenes on the park and level to a key part of Hagenbeck’s success. Born in 1844, when he was a baby Carl Hagenbeck’s father, a Hamburg fishmonger, started a facet enterprise shopping for and promoting uncommon animals – every part from primates to birds to uncommon reptiles and cats (he even claimed in his 1908 memoir that he had despatched an expedition to what’s now Zimbabwe to catch a dinosaur) – arriving from all around the world on the busy Hamburg port. Carl took over this enterprise in 1860 and in simply a few many years constructed a world community of contacts, changing into a key provider of animals to zoos, circuses, and personal collectors world wide.
Hagenbeck’s agency was the supply of most of the animals on this planet’s zoos within the late nineteenth century, however he was additionally an innovator who developed his personal profitable circuses and travelling reveals. In 1896 he patented ‘the moat’ as a revolutionary technique of separating animals from one another and the general public. For many years, critics of zoos had pointed to cages, bars, and squalid circumstances. As London’s Day by day Information famous in 1869, ‘We’re all bored with the dismal menagerie cages. The cramped stroll, the weary stressed motion of the top … the bored look, the synthetic habits’. When Hagenbeck’s Tierpark opened in 1907, nevertheless, the general public was proven a brand new means of exhibiting animals. Fairly than pacing backwards and forwards in small cages, animals on the park had been proven in naturalistic landscapes. The areas weren’t that giant and should not have been a lot of an enchancment in animal welfare, however the panoramas had been massively profitable with the general public and are the origin of the best way we encounter animals in zoos as we speak. Whereas the poet Rainer Maria Rilke described the panther’s world on the Jardin des Plantes in Paris in 1907 as ‘a thousand bars and nothing else’, at Hagenbeck’s park, the corporate argued, ‘ibexes, chamois, and antelopes needn’t belief their lives in captivity to low cages, however reasonably might try for the heights on a cliff-like ridge’, and ‘the king of the animals strikes about in freedom, in proud majesty in his large grotto’.
Nonetheless revolutionary Hagenbeck’s park might have appeared when in comparison with the massive public zoos of the time – akin to these in London, Berlin, and New York – it was additionally totally different as a result of the animals had been normally in transit. The park was a type of holding facility and showroom the place animals arrived of their lots of earlier than being shipped out. The numbers of animals that had been acquired after which offered by Hagenbeck are tough to grasp. In response to the memoir of Ludwig Zukowsky, who was employed by Hagenbeck’s as a taxonomist in 1913, two hours after he arrived on the park, he was despatched right down to the port to itemise a cargo from Australia and located, amongst many different creatures, 40 kangaroos, 26 emus, 600 smaller birds, and 300 reptiles. On the identical time, he recalled, a cargo from Africa had arrived with 36 gnus, 25 zebras, three rhinos, and 5 giraffes, together with one other 300 smaller animals. Zukowsky reckoned that in his 17 years with the agency – years that included the First World Warfare and the tough financial circumstances of the Weimar Republic – the corporate dealt with over 400 polar bears and a couple of,000 penguins.
Hagenbeck additionally specialised in bringing to Western zoos animals that had by no means or solely not often been seen earlier than, together with takhi, elephant seals, and pygmy hippos. The corporate had the experience, personnel, and contacts not solely to amass uncommon animals, however to ship them virtually wherever. In 1907, for instance, the corporate offered animals to 45 totally different zoos in what are actually Germany, the Netherlands, Greece, the UK, France, Argentina, Switzerland, China, the US, Eire, Australia, India, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, South Africa, Sweden, Japan, and Russia. Amongst these shipments was a kind of starter-set of animals despatched to a soon-to-be-opened zoo in Beijing, which included 38 species of mammals (largely in pairs and together with an elephant) and 18 species of birds, all bought for 76,566.55 marks – greater than £463,000 as we speak.
Numbers like these may counsel that Hagenbeck’s enterprise was targeted virtually solely on constructing relationships with giant zoos, circuses, and aristocratic patrons. However this doesn’t clarify the tortoises. In response to Zukowsky, an agent for the agency arrived in Hamburg on Saturday 30 Could 1914 with a supply of the standard mammals and birds from Russia; however the cargo additionally contained 8,000 Horsfield tortoises, a quantity which far exceeded the zoos’ demand. As a substitute, the tortoises level to the extraordinary variety of animals purchased by abnormal folks for comparatively small quantities of cash. Zukowsky explains that many of the tortoises had been offered the subsequent day, Whit Sunday – one of many greatest customer days of the yr at Hagenbeck’s. The smallest tortoises had been in highest demand and had been offered for the most important sums, the equal as we speak of £5.64 every (the bigger specimens went for the equal of £1.41).
From the agency’s ledgers we study that Hagenbeck’s offered the 2025 equal of greater than £4.8 million of animals in 1907, virtually doubling income from ten years earlier. However we are able to additionally discover web page after web page of purchases made by particular person patrons on the lookout for only one animal – a parrot, a racoon, a rhesus monkey, a small alligator, a guinea pig, a silky poodle, an ass, a python, a pheasant, or a duck. A few of these animals, such because the tortoises, had been primarily souvenirs. Others, akin to parrots and monkeys, turned uncommon pets for a few years. Nonetheless others turned a part of acclimatisation efforts as folks explored whether or not ostrich farms or uncommon cattle is likely to be profitably raised in Europe. Whereas non-public collections like that of the duke of Bedford at Woburn Abbey or Walter Rothschild at Tring had been uncommon, abnormal folks buying extraordinary animals was not.
Nigel Rothfels is a historian on the College of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
