The Hunt for the Golden Mole

by Richard Girling

  ‘I found the animal in a very exhausted condition, not able to stand, and so weak that it could with difficulty crawl from one end of its long cage to the other. It was suffering from frequent discharges of frothy, slimy faecal matter. This filth had so completely covered and matted its fur that its appearance and smell was most offensive.’ He identifies the species as Ailurus fulgens, the small, teddy-bear-like red panda, not the giant panda Ailuropoda melanoleuca, but most people today would be able to guess what it ate – mostly bamboo, supplemented by eggs, birds and small mammals. Bartlett, however, knew none of this. ‘The instructions I received with reference to its food were that it should have about a quart of milk per day, with a little boiled rice and grass. It was evident that this food, the change of climate, the sea voyage, or the treatment on board ship had reduced the poor beast to this pitiable condition.’ With no textbook to consult, Bartlett could only guess what to feed it with. He went to work with a zeal that might have earned the envy of his contemporary, Isabella Beeton. First he tried raw and boiled chicken, rabbit and ‘other animal substances’, but the panda would have none of them. ‘I found, however, it would take arrowroot, with the yelks [sic] of eggs and sugar mixed with boiled milk; and in a few days I saw some improvement in its condition. I then gave it strong beef-tea well sweetened, adding pea-flour, Indian-corn flour, and other farinaceous food, varying the mixture daily.’

  Soon the panda was well enough to be let out into the gardens, where it straightaway attacked the fruit and foliage. It liked particularly the large yellow berries of a tree Bartlett named as Pyrus vestita, now better known as Sorbus cuspidata, a native of China, the country whose south-western provinces are the panda’s home. ‘He would grasp the bunch in his paw, holding it tightly, and bite off these berries one by one; so delighted with this food was he, that all other food was left as long as these berries lasted.’ It enabled Bartlett to conclude ‘that berries, fruit, and other vegetable substances constitute the food of this animal in a wild state’. For zookeepers of the nineteenth century, this was how it went. They would work like field naturalists on the basis of observation wherever that was possible, and by trial and error when it wasn’t.

  They also learned to respect wild animals’ natures, and did not expect them to cosy up like family pets. Bartlett noted somewhat ruefully the panda’s ‘fierce and angry disposition’, though he believed this to be a peculiarity of the individual and not necessarily typical of the species. Even an attack was the subject of careful study: ‘When offended, it would rush at me and strike with both feet, not, like a cat, sideways or downwards, but forward, and the body raised like a bear, the claws protruding, but not hooked or brought down like the claws of a cat . . .’

  One of Bartlett’s many scientific acquaintances, and a frequent visitor to the zoo, was a naturalist called Frank Buckland, who (as we shall see) studied all things zoological with a passion that verged on mania. He was also a prolific writer who liked to publish his correspondence with other enthusiasts. One of these was Bartlett, who sent him a long description of how he had treated a hippopotamus with a broken tooth. Deciding that extraction was the only answer, and working from behind an oak fence, he had proceeded with ‘a fearful struggle’ involving an enormous pair of forceps more than two feet long. The operation began well. He quickly managed to get a grip on the fractured incisor, which he intended to remove ‘with a firm and determined twist’. The hippo, alas, was both firmer and more determined, and the forceps were wrenched from Bartlett’s grasp. It was a tribute to the quality of the carpenters’ work that the fence stood up to the animal’s charge and Bartlett survived to try again. This time he had a little more success – the tooth was actually loosened – but again the patient had the better of him and the forceps went flying. The third attempt artfully capitalised on the animal’s rage. ‘Looking as wild as a hippopotamus can look’, the monster advanced upon Bartlett with its jaws at full stretch, wide enough to swallow a canoe. The ‘coveted morsel’, as Bartlett put it, was then easily grasped and, ‘with a good sharp pull and a twist’, drawn out. Like everything else about the animal, it was huge. ‘One of the most remarkable things,’ Bartlett wrote, ‘appeared to me to be the enormous force of the air when blown from the dilated nostrils of this great beast while enraged. It came against me with a force that quite surprised me.’

  One cannot quarrel with Buckland’s opinion that the superintendent ‘deserves great credit for his ingenuity and the surgical skill he displayed with his huge patient’. In many ways Buckland himself was no less adventurous. It was his habit, for example, to cook and eat animals that had died in the zoo, and he once entertained an audience at Brighton by serving them rhinoceros pie. His real passion, however, was what he liked to call hippophagotomy, or the consumption of horseflesh. This had begun with an invitation to lunch, and a challenge, from Bartlett himself, who had placed ‘two exceedingly fine hot steaks’ on the table. One was ‘rump-steak proper’, and the other a slice of horse. In a blind tasting, both men preferred the horse. ‘Uncommon good,’ said Buckland.

  But he knew his enthusiasm would not be widely shared. Indeed, it gave him the idea for a novel method of deterring crime. It was perfectly simple. The ‘lower classes’, he argued, had an irrational horror of eating horse, which they regarded as fit only for cats. Therefore all that was needed to curb their anti-social tendencies was to serve the stuff in prisons. ‘Be assured these fellows who would garrote [sic] you, murder your wives and children, or commit the most fearful crimes, would shudder at the thought of dining upon horseflesh.’ The theory was never put into practice, though its basic premiss was vividly demonstrated early in 2013 when some meat products in England and France were found to contain more horse than beef. In the face of public outrage, supermarkets competed to out-apologise each other and be first to clear ‘value’ burgers, lasagne and spaghetti bolognese from their shelves. Regulatory authorities across Europe swooped on shops, processors and abattoirs, and the British prime minister was urged by the leader of the opposition to ‘get a grip’.

  It took a lot to make Buckland himself shudder. Squeamishness was not in his vocabulary. When an old lion died at the zoo, he was present at the dissection to peel the skin from the foot and fiddle with the tendons (they worked ‘with the ease of a greased rope in a well-worn pulley’). When lions broke out of their cage at Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre in Westminster Bridge Road, Lambeth – birthplace of the circus ring – he was on hand to examine the corpse of the unlucky stable-hand who got in their way. ‘It will probably interest the reader, to read some remarks on the nature of the wounds, and on the probable way, judging from these wounds, in which the lion seized the man.’ And on he went, scratch by scratch, bite by bite. ‘I account for there being so many more wounds on the left side than on the right side by assuming that the lion (as is its habit) cuffed him first on the right side and caught and held him on the left, just as we see a kitten playing with a ball of worsted.’

  Buckland was a disputatious fellow, probably not the kind of man it would have been wise to accuse of hypocrisy to his face. A hundred and thirty years after his death, however, he seems fair game. Like most gentlemen of his time, he was an eager sportsman who enjoyed nothing better than a duck-shoot at dawn, proudly recording the rain of teal and widgeon from the sky. But if he was easy of conscience, he was markedly less forgiving of others. In the third volume of his Curiosities of Natural History, he seems suddenly overcome by loathing for his fellow hunters:

  In reading the accounts of the mighty elephant in the jungle of India, of the watching for the beasts of the forest drinking at midnight at the lone desert fountain in Central Africa, of the fierce gorilla in the dense forests of the tropics, or of wild ducks and swans on some lonely lake or swamp, I often come on the most exciting description of the discovery of these creatures, feeding quietly and undisturbed in their native homes. What a chance, what an opportunity of learning their habits, and their loves, and their wars! But �
�� No; man thirsts for their blood. A few lines further down the page of the book we read the old story – I mentally hear the ring of the rifle or gun – and in an instant a beautiful scene of Nature is ruthlessly dissipated. The frightened creatures fly hither and thither; what was but just now all happiness and quiet, resolves itself into bloodshed, turmoil and misery . . . Let a knowledge of the habits of an animal or bird be of far greater value to the sportsman-naturalist than the possession of its bleeding carcase.

  It takes him only another eight pages to revert to type, uncritically recording how his late friend Dr Genzick of Vienna had killed a hippopotamus.

  . . .The ball struck the hippopotamus full on the head, and he sank instantly to the bottom, where he kicked up such a turmoil that, as Genzick said, ‘one would have thought there was a steam-engine gone mad at the bottom of the river’. However, the doctor never found the hippopotamus, though he hunted everywhere for him, but the next year he discovered his whitened bones upon a sand-bank some distance from the place where he had shot him. He knew it was the beast he had shot the year before, for he recognised the bullet he found in his skull as his own make.

  This does not mark out either Buckland or Genzick as a moral degenerate. Even down to their inconsistencies, they conformed to the spirit of their age. Men with a true and affectionate interest in animals were a willing party to what any civilised person now would deplore as unspeakable cruelty. They saw no contradiction in this, still less hypocrisy, but only the hard demands of necessity. Even among their own kind, death was a frequent visitor who – pace Stamford Raffles – often called unannounced, and seldom with the clean finality of a bullet. Sentimentality was for novelists. If zoos and museums wanted animals, then someone would have to go and fetch them. Milksops need not apply. For a European or an American, just getting to Africa and surviving there would require both a rugged body and uncommon strength of mind. Add confrontations with snakes, insects and man-eating lions, and the necessary qualifications excluded all but the most determined of adventurers. I’ve seen no evidence that Frank Buckland himself ever strayed far beyond Paris, but this did not stop him from describing the dangers of further continents. Hippos in particular seemed to fascinate him, and he cites a ‘Mr Petherick’ (presumably the Welsh mining engineer, explorer and collector John Petherick) as his source for a vivid account of the risks to men in boats. A hippo, he explains, will attack in one of two ways. In shallow water it will bound up to the boat, then ‘rise open-mouthed and endeavour to carry off some one on board’. In deeper water it will drive at full speed underneath and use its head as a battering ram. Mr Petherick told him of boats being instantaneously sunk, and of a man being cut in two by the animal’s teeth.

  Hunters’ yarns make fishermen’s tales seem like essays in modesty. One of the most shameless exponents of the bragger’s art was Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming (1820–1866), the self-glorifying Old-Etonian son of a Scottish baronet who was proud to be known as ‘the lion hunter’. His own written account, Five Years of a Hunter’s Life in the Far Interior of South Africa, published in 1850, contains such a sustained crescendo of bare-chested boasting that the feminist characterisation of masculinity as ‘testosterone poisoning’ no longer seems quite so unreasonable. How to remove a wounded hippo from a pool? Easy! Plunging into the water with a knife, Gordon-Cumming cuts a slit in the animal’s hide like a belt-tab on a waistband. A thong threaded through the loop is then passed up to his men, who form up like a tug of war team and haul the beast ashore. Perhaps these are lines to be read between, but Gordon-Cumming cannot be dismissed out of hand as a fantasist. His vast collection of hunting trophies and stuffed animals – weighing in all 27.21 tonnes – caused a sensation at the Great Exhibition in 1851, and no less a figure than David Livingstone attested that his book conveyed a ‘truthful idea’ of the hunter’s life. It remains a classic of sporting literature, which even in its time caused amazement. To the armchair readers of Victorian England it was a tale of heroism drenched in the spirit of Empire. To a modern reader it can seem simply outrageous. No pages ever dripped with more blood; no writer ever found more glory in the taking of life, or showed less remorse for the suffering he caused; no book ever spoke more definitively of attitudes that, in a century of blazing attrition, would bring nature to its knees.

  Gordon-Cumming nevertheless was both brave and resourceful. He lurched about southern Africa in a wagon train that time and again would lose its wheels or bog itself down in desert or river, drawn by uncooperative oxen whose lives were sucked out of them by tsetse flies. He spent nights in bothies roofed with elephants’ ears, while his animals and men fell prey to disease, buffaloes and lions. In the course of four expeditions he lost forty-five horses, seventy cattle and seventy dogs. All that remained of his best wagon-driver one morning was a leg bitten off below the knee, still wearing its shoe. Gordon-Cumming himself, though weakened by rheumatic fever and too much rhinoceros meat, never faltered in his appetite for sport or his determination to enjoy it. When the barrel of a favourite gun burst, burning his arm and causing temporary deafness, he ‘mourned over it as David mourned for Absalom’, but then simply switched to ‘the double-barrelled Moore and Purdey rifles, carrying sixteen to the pound’ and made bullets for them by melting down his snuffers, spoons, candlesticks, teapots and cups. His accounts were declared by some commentators to be ‘romantic’. They are certainly graphic.

  . . . I was loading and firing as fast as I could, sometimes at the head and sometimes behind the shoulder, until my elephant’s forequarters were a mass of gore, notwithstanding which he continued to hold stoutly on, leaving the grass and branches of the forest scarlet in his wake.

  Having fired thirty-five rounds with my two-grooved rifle, I opened fire upon him with the Dutch six-pounder; and when forty bullets had perforated his hide, he began for the first time to evince signs of a dilapidated constitution.

  The tally of elephants rises to fifty, then to a hundred. Many of them die after prolonged ‘fights’ that go on for hours, with the quarry constantly harried by dogs and fired upon by Gordon-Cumming from his horse. One such bout goes on from half past eleven in the morning until after sundown, by which time the ‘venerable monarch of the forest’ has received fifty-seven bullets. The high price of ivory adds an economic impulse to the sport, but Gordon-Cumming doesn’t stop at elephants. Antelopes, rhinoceroses, hippos, giraffes, lions, wildebeest, buffaloes, zebras, kudus, elands, wild boars and crocodiles are all ‘bowled over’ by his fire. In one pool alone he kills fifteen hippos. Bullets pierce shoulders, legs, flanks, necks, breasts, eyes, mouths and brains. He does not say that killing is better than sex, but it certainly beats anything else he can think of. Taking your pick of five old bull elephants, he finds, ‘is so overpoweringly exciting that it almost takes a man’s breath away’.

  He is not blind to the animals’ beauty, but it seems only to increase his pleasure in killing them. ‘I was struck with admiration at the magnificence of the noble black buck, and I vowed in my heart to slay him . . .’ After a wounded lion has crawled off and died, he regrets the inadequate power of words to convey his feelings. ‘No description could give a correct idea of the surpassing beauty of this most majestic animal, as he lay still warm before me.’ There is an aesthetic of death. As beauty enhances the thrill, so ugliness must diminish it. Afterwards, returning to camp, he spots and kills an ‘extremely old’ black rhinoceros, but can find little or nothing to commend it. ‘His horns were quite worn down and amalgamated, resembling the stump of an old oak tree.’

  The numbers of dead were prodigious. The 27 tonnes of exhibits that drew the crowds in 1851 were not the total weight of animals Gordon-Cumming had killed but just the heads, horns, tusks and skins that he stripped from the bodies. Apart from some meat and fat taken for food, all the rest was left where it fell. Where the specimens were not of exhibition quality, he might not take anything at all. The only benefits were to vultures and hyenas.

  And not all the animals
died – or at least they did not die quickly. Gordon-Cumming forever complains of wounded animals dragging themselves away, leaving only trails of bloody footprints into the bush. He is ‘very much annoyed at wounding and losing in the last week no less than ten first-rate old bull elephants’. Another time he bags five ‘first-rate hippopotami’, but only at the cost of wounding three or four more. Casually he maims a white rhinoceros but is so preoccupied with the elephants that he does not follow up to kill it. Lions, buffaloes, crocodiles and antelopes are wounded too, but never does Gordon-Cumming’s regret extend further than his loss of a trophy. It certainly does nothing to dampen his pleasure. The wounding of eight elephants is all part of ‘the finest night’s sport and the most wonderful that was ever enjoyed by man’.

  Gordon-Cumming of course deserves to be judged by the standards of his own day rather than ours, and in his own day he was a hero. One of the antelopes he shot turned out to be a new species which still bears his name: Tragelaphus scriptus roualeyni, the Limpopo bushbuck. ‘Conservation’ in the mid nineteenth century was not an issue or, in its modern sense, even yet a word. The forests of Africa teemed with fur and the oceans teemed with fin. Men by their own efforts could no more deplete this almighty horde than they could fly to the moon or warp the climate. Such things were the province of God alone. Few people now would argue with Jeremy Bentham’s caution on the nature and quality of non-human life. ‘The question,’ he said ‘is not “Can they reason?” nor, “Can they talk?” but rather, “Can they suffer?”’ Philosophers and psychologists still argue about the conscious lives of animals, their self-knowledge and ‘intelligence’, but none now doubts they can feel pain. Many believe they suffer emotionally too. But what is commonplace in the twenty-first century was not so clear in the nineteenth. It is true that Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, had been dead for nearly twenty years before Gordon-Cumming published his book, but the question was still hanging. Could animals suffer? René Descartes had been dead for exactly two hundred years, but his ideas still cast a shadow.