Entertaining Elephants is a remarkable book, bringing together business history, the study of human-animal relationships, and animal welfare science to show how elephants were actors, not just objects, in American circus entertainment. Providing a thorough history of an important cultural industry, Nance also makes a profound contribution to our understanding of the experiences of nonhuman animals by using “recent ethological and animal welfare science research . . . as a theoretical base for the interpretation of historical elephants,” helping us to understand both these animals’ experiences in captivity and how they actively constructed their worlds while being constructed in them (p. 11).
Nance begins by telling the story of the first two elephants imported into America, in 1797 and 1803. These young elephants, separated from their mothers and brought from Asia as part of a speculative global trade in exotic species, entertained audiences throughout the new nation, providing an emotionally rich animal encounter that prompted speculation about natural history and the propriety of animal exhibitions. Nance notes that from the start, these animal entertainments “praised the audience (and their critics) with high-minded patter while offering experiences of animals that actually confirmed most ticket buyers’ desire to impose their needs on entertainment animals,” establishing a pattern that continues to mark the animal show trade (pp. 34–35).
Nance pays close attention throughout her study to animal exhibitions as a business that required particular management and marketing strategies given the rarity, intelligence, power, and agency of elephants. In the early republic, proprietors had to purchase, feed, transport, and show elephants, enable audiences to see them as individuals, and manage the large and often rowdy crowds that attended shows in part to witness “elephant initiated action” (p. 26). From its start, much of the story involves elephant suffering and death. The elephant named Old Bet, for example, was shot to death in Maine in 1816, although her savvy proprietors took advantage of this notorious incident to exhibit her skeleton.
Nance's second chapter looks at how antebellum showmen created the persona of the “performing animal actor” to sell an elephant as “a consumer-friendly animal with a biography, noted individual habits, human friends, and a desire to travel around America for the audience's enjoyment” (p. 41). Elephants were among the few named circus and menagerie animals, anthropomorphized and turned into celebrities. By the 1830s enough elephants were being imported that circuses could create complex performances featuring fantastic elephant action that endorsed human supremacy over nature and emphasized consumer privilege. Chapter 3, “Learning to Take Direction,” tells the fascinating story of elephant training, noting that human dominance, exemplified by the elephant hook, lay behind the iconic genial elephant. Here Nance shows how “elephants structured the training process by following their own desires,” albeit in a context where cruelty and brutality proved necessary to keep workers, elephants, and audiences safe (p. 95).
Chapter 4 charts the problems with bull elephants in the circus, arguing that these males “responded to the conditions of their captivity in the United States and radically altered the work cultures of show business” (p. 107). Elephant attacks on keepers raised the question of whether wild animals were inherently unpredictable, although circus men largely preferred to believe that the animals struck out only because they were confused, emphasizing the need for further control. Elephants were punished, often by frequent “re-breaking,” and the unruly elephant became a cultural trope as some elephants went from glamorous to dangerous. In the process, “elephants became some of the most celebrated and most abused animals in American show business” (p. 137).
After the Civil War, circuses began to keep larger herds of elephants as part of an “elephant arms race” (p. 146). Chapter 5 looks at the challenges of herd management and the creation of a new “industrial elephant” icon as elephant labor became central to both the meaning and the logistics of the circus. Nance uses management sources to trace the conflicts between “barn men, trainers, and company owners” over who should have authority over elephants (p. 161). She notes the emergence of a vicious circle in which elephants suffering from daily confinement, training, discipline, and poor health acted in ways that led handlers to call for more hands-on management that in turn produced further behaviors “destructive to circus routines and to elephant and human health” (p. 174).
Nance's final chapters take us into the early twentieth century, when many believed that elephants seemed furious at the circus, undermining workplace and performance efficiency, killing handlers, and going on rampages. Circus folk tried to spin these stories, but in the end, Nance shows how the failure here was human: circus people failed their elephants, and many elephants suffered and died because of it. The circus began to emphasize kindness training, but also tried to “push news of elephant disobedience underground” (p. 207). Nance ends by noting the fulfillment of a long-held dream of breeding elephants in America, marked by the birth of Columbia in 1880. Predictably, Columbia's mother had no parenting skills, and despite the frenzy for baby elephants that resulted, Columbia turned into a “bad” elephant and was quietly killed, away from public view.
Nance notes that elephants were ultimately too powerful and too self-directed to be dependable and domesticated. Since the peak of animal-based circuses in 1907, there has been a steady move away from the use of elephants in entertainment. Nance concludes Entertaining Elephants by noting how recent decades have seen a change in public perception about elephants, one that has undermined the authority of the circus elephant experts. Today there are fewer than a dozen animal-act circuses touring the United States, and they are met by protests from activist groups that have successfully marketed a sad circus elephant icon. Because circuses themselves have moved from the center to the margins of American popular culture, the long-term future of performing elephants, the animal that helped define the circus, is uncertain.
In detailing the lives and use of elephants in the American circus in the long nineteenth century, Nance shows not just how elephants were exploited by circuses, but also how elephant abilities and skills shaped the business of the circus. Her highly readable, always interesting, and innovative study includes a useful “Essay on Sources” for those interested in the business and cultural history of nineteenth-century entertainment, animal welfare research on elephants, and the growing body of literature in animal history and animal studies. Most importantly, this wonderful multispecies monograph makes us think differently about American business and cultural history and the history of human-animal relationships, showing how human and nonhuman animals have shaped the past together.
