Walruses #1 (From Richard Reynolds)

!cid_X_MA1_1223580143@aol, originally uploaded by bucklesw1. Around 1908 or so Carl Hagenbeck had a trained female walrus (shown here). He claimed she was the only one ever tamed and taught to perform tricks. When she was two years old she weighed 380 pounds and consumed 70 pounds of boneless fish a day; and a year later not less than 100 lbs. satisfied her. Supposedly she was sent to a zoo in Romania, but where would that have been? From all I can tell the Bucharest zoo was not in existence that far back - -perhaps a private place? World War I and the resulting collapse of the German economy devastated the Hagenbeck firm. The great Stellingen Tierpark closed on 3 October 1920 and was not reopened for three and a half years. A long article, “Hagenbeck’s Closes Its Doors” appeared in Billboard, 18 Dec. 1920, p. 92. It detailed the appalling animal losses from hunger and cold caused by wartime conditions, among which were: “… the entire Hagenbeck stock of seals…, likewise one of the great prizes of the Stellingen collection, a remarkable trained walrus, the last of its kind in captivity.” That would have been a successor to the one pictured above. Hagenbeck was a pioneer in keeping walruses and had many of them over the years. In his book, >>Beasts and Men<< (English translation, 1910), he mentions receiving three youngsters in October 1907 and another five in September 1908, all eight of which he kept together in the Arctic Panorama at his Stellingen Tierpark. He devotes much time to describing how difficult it is to keep walruses in captivity, a persistent problem until recently as Jim Alexander mentioned in a recent walrus comment on the blog. Notwithstanding the difficulty keeping them, in 1908 Hagenbeck tried to talk the Ringlings into buying a walrus. In a letter dated October 29, 1908 Hagenbeck wrote the Baraboo brothers as follows >>I am sure you could keep him (walrus) alive just as well as your Hippopotamus, as a walrus, if he has got his water, can stand more heat than any other animal. The heat will not kill him but you must be careful in winter that he does not catch cold. My walrus are staying summer and winter in the open air, and they are always to be found where they have got the best of sun. If you can get them enough fish, such as haddocks or bluefish or other large sorts of fish, which they must have without bones and in small pieces, then you can keep them alive years and years.<< [Letter in Pfening archives] This was a case of questionable sales ethics because Hagenbeck had just written in his book how difficult they were to keep. Wisely, the Ringlings did not bite on the walrus. True one could probably be hauled around (perhaps for a short time) in a big hippo wagon with a bathing tank. However, they are fond of fully submerging in a pool much deeper than the shallow ones in hippo cages. That would not bode well for life on the road. Moreover, the specialized diet would be too tricky for a field show to manage and likely would not be cost effective vs. the exhibition value. For sure a circus walrus would require a keeper who did nothing but look after him and his specialized needs.