How the lives and labors of nineteenth-century circus elephants shaped
the entertainment industry.
Consider the career of an enduring if controversial icon of American
entertainment: the genial circus elephant. In Entertaining Elephants
Susan Nance examines elephant behavior--drawing on the scientific
literature of animal cognition, learning, and communications--to offer a
study of elephants as actors (rather than objects) in American circus
entertainment between 1800 and 1940. By developing a deeper
understanding of animal behavior, Nance asserts, we can more fully
explain the common history of all species.
Entertaining Elephants is the first account that uses research on
animal welfare, health, and cognition to interpret the historical
record, examining how both circus people and elephants struggled behind
the scenes to meet the profit necessities of the entertainment business.
The book does not claim that elephants understood, endorsed, or resisted
the world of show business as a human cultural or business practice, but
it does speak of elephants rejecting the conditions of their experience.
They lived in a kind of parallel reality in the circus, one that was
defined by their interactions with people, other elephants, horses, bull
hooks, hay, and the weather.
Nance's study informs and complicates contemporary debates over human
interactions with animals in entertainment and beyond, questioning the
idea of human control over animals and people's claims to speak for
them. As sentient beings, these elephants exercised agency, but they had
no way of understanding the human cultures that created their captivity,
and they obviously had no claim on (human) social and political power.
They often lived lives of apparent desperation.
