Carl Hagenbeck's Eight Thousand Tortoises

In the archive of Carl Hagenbeck’s Tierpark (Animal Park), which opened in Hamburg in 1907, there is a remarkable photograph of a few thousand tortoises in two large pens. They were not an exhibit, but they give us a glimpse behind the scenes at the park and point to a key component of Hagenbeck’s success. Born in 1844, when he was a child Carl Hagenbeck’s father, a Hamburg fishmonger, began a side business buying and selling unusual animals – everything from primates to birds to rare reptiles and cats (he even claimed in his 1908 memoir that he had sent an expedition to what is now Zimbabwe to catch a dinosaur) – arriving from all over the world at the busy Hamburg port. Carl took over this business in 1860 and in just a couple of decades built an international network of contacts, becoming a key supplier of animals to zoos, circuses, and private collectors around the world.

Hagenbeck’s firm was the source of many of the animals in the world’s zoos in the late 19th century, but he was also an innovator who developed his own successful circuses and travelling exhibits. In 1896 he patented ‘the moat’ as a revolutionary means of separating animals from each other and the public. For decades, critics of zoos had pointed to cages, bars, and squalid conditions. As London’s Daily News noted in 1869, ‘We are all tired of the dismal menagerie cages. The cramped walk, the weary restless movement of the head ... the bored look, the artificial habits’. When Hagenbeck’s Tierpark opened in 1907, however, the public was shown a new way of exhibiting animals. Rather than pacing back and forth in small cages, animals at the park were shown in naturalistic landscapes. The spaces were not that large and may not have been much of an improvement in animal welfare, but the panoramas were hugely successful with the public and are the origin of the way we encounter animals in zoos today. Whereas the poet Rainer Maria Rilke described the panther’s world at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris in 1907 as ‘a thousand bars and nothing else’, at Hagenbeck’s park, the company argued, ‘ibexes, chamois, and antelopes need not trust their lives in captivity to low cages, but rather could strive for the heights on a cliff-like ridge’, and ‘the king of the animals moves about in freedom, in proud majesty in his wide grotto’.

However revolutionary Hagenbeck’s park may have appeared when compared to the large public zoos of the time – such as those in London, Berlin, and New York – it was also different because the animals were usually in transit. The park was a kind of holding facility and showroom where animals arrived in their hundreds before being shipped out. The numbers of animals that were acquired and then sold by Hagenbeck are difficult to comprehend. According to the memoir of Ludwig Zukowsky, who was hired by Hagenbeck’s as a taxonomist in 1913, two hours after he arrived at the park, he was sent down to the port to itemise a shipment from Australia and found, among many other creatures, 40 kangaroos, 26 emus, 600 smaller birds, and 300 reptiles. At the same time, he recalled, a shipment from Africa had arrived with 36 gnus, 25 zebras, three rhinos, and five giraffes, along with another 300 smaller animals. Zukowsky reckoned that during his 17 years with the firm – years that included the First World War and the difficult economic conditions of the Weimar Republic – the company handled over 400 polar bears and 2,000 penguins.

Hagenbeck also specialised in bringing to Western zoos animals that had never or only rarely been seen before, including takhi, elephant seals, and pygmy hippos. The company had the expertise, personnel, and contacts not only to acquire unusual animals, but to ship them almost anywhere. In 1907, for example, the company sold animals to 45 different zoos in what are now Germany, the Netherlands, Greece, the UK, France, Argentina, Switzerland, China, the US, Ireland, Australia, India, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, South Africa, Sweden, Japan, and Russia. Among those shipments was a sort of starter-set of animals sent to a soon-to-be-opened zoo in Beijing, which included 38 species of mammals (mostly in pairs and including an elephant) and 18 species of birds, all purchased for 76,566.55 marks – more than £463,000 today.

Numbers like those might suggest that Hagenbeck’s business was focused almost exclusively on building relationships with large zoos, circuses, and aristocratic buyers. But this does not explain the tortoises. According to Zukowsky, an agent for the firm arrived in Hamburg on Saturday 30 May 1914 with a delivery of the usual mammals and birds from Russia; but the shipment also contained 8,000 Horsfield tortoises, a number which far exceeded the zoos’ demand. Instead, the tortoises point to the extraordinary number of animals bought by ordinary people for relatively small amounts of money. Zukowsky explains that most of the tortoises were sold the next day, Whit Sunday – one of the biggest visitor days of the year at Hagenbeck’s. The smallest tortoises were in highest demand and were sold for the largest sums, the equivalent today of £5.64 each (the larger specimens went for the equivalent of £1.41).

From the firm’s ledgers we learn that Hagenbeck’s sold the 2025 equivalent of more than £4.8 million of animals in 1907, almost doubling revenue from ten years earlier. But we can also find page after page of purchases made by individual buyers looking for just 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. Some of these animals, such as the tortoises, were essentially souvenirs. Others, such as parrots and monkeys, became unusual pets for many years. Still others became part of acclimatisation efforts as people explored whether ostrich farms or unusual cattle might be profitably raised in Europe. While private collections like that of the duke of Bedford at Woburn Abbey or Walter Rothschild at Tring were rare, ordinary people purchasing extraordinary animals was not.

Nigel Rothfels is a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.