lancaster
(.470 member)
02/11/24 05:42 AM
Killing Elefants with canons

by coincidense I see this on the german wikipedia and it looks like this is not available in english.
for historical and educational purposes I made an english translation here:

"The Elephant of Murten († 29 June 1866) was a circus elephant that killed its keeper in the small Swiss town of Murten in the canton of Fribourg and was then shot to death by a cannonball. The skeleton is in the Natural History Museum in Bern.



The American travelling circus Bell & Myers stopped off in Murten on 27 June 1866 on the occasion of a weekly market and gave a performance the following day. The attraction was two trained elephants, one female and one male, who performed tricks. As the town was small and the circus performance was already very well attended, the company decided not to put on another, less profitable show and decided to move on the next day. In the early hours of the morning, the male elephant killed the keeper who had been looking after him for 14 years and ran out of his home, a municipal shed, into the streets of Murten. The elephant had already shown aggressive behaviour in the past, in which he had killed a horse and displayed an uncontrollable destructive rage. It was probably in musth, a testosterone-induced excitement phase that only occurs in adult bull elephants.

The elephant hunt and its consequences
The chase by the circus operators and the Murten residents who supported them was unsuccessful. For some time, the uncontrollable animal ran back and forth and caused riots among the residents. The pursuers succeeded in trapping the elephant by building barricades in an alley. The circus owner decided to have it killed. Around midday on 29 June, a gun ordered in Freiburg, a six-pounder with ammunition, was brought into position and fired. The projectile fatally hit the animal, which died immediately. After the dead elephant handler had been buried in the Murten cemetery that afternoon, the circus moved on, leaving the elephant's carcass behind for the people of Murten[1].
As in the case of one of Garnier's two elephants, which had also been killed by cannons in cities at the beginning of the 19th century, and later by Castor and Pollux in Paris in 1870, the animal's meat was sold to the citizens of the city for consumption. The elephant skin was prepared so that the pachyderm could be exhibited for a fee. A pavilion was erected for this purpose. However, the town council did not consider an exhibition to be profitable and sold the stuffed elephant together with the separately prepared skeleton to the museum in Bern for 2900 francs. The costs incurred by the city for the elephant up to that point totalled 3316 francs and 99 centimes. The pavilion was demolished

Preservation
The skeleton, which has particularly large tusks, belongs to the collection of the Anatomical Institute of the University of Bern, which has given its holdings to the Natural History Museum on permanent loan. It can be viewed there today. However, there has been no trace of the stuffed bull skin since the museum moved in 1940.
The event is recorded as the Murten Elephant Hunt in eyewitness accounts, newspaper articles and minutes of council meetings. Hermann Schöpfer collated the documents in 1974, including the report written in 1868 by local locksmith Johann Frey. The original manuscript of this detailed account has been lost, but a copy was preserved in Murten's private possession. Stephan Oettermann reproduced this report in full in 1982.
The lower part of Rathausgasse in Murten is still known as ‘Elefantengasse’ in memory of the event[5].
To mark the 150th anniversary of the events, a walk-in sculpture by artist Beat Breitenstein was erected in June 2016, an elephant figure made from several hundred slabs of oak wood and steel beams. It stands in front of the Murtner Museum."
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elefant_von_Murten

and two other similar cases

"Elephants of Garnier
The two elephants of Garnier, named after their owner, a Berlin showman and animal dealer, caused quite a stir in 1819 and 1820, as they were killed one after the other and in different places by cannon shots through walls.

The execution of Mademoiselle Garnier's elephant in Geneva on 31 May 1820
The showman Garnier travelled all over Europe with his animal shows. He had constructed special carriages to transport his elephants, which secured the animals as they walked. The two pachyderms got out of control during their presentations - one in Venice and the other a year later in Geneva - and, as they could not be tamed, were each shot with a cannonball. The idea of using a cannon to deal with elephants that had escaped and could not be tamed was quite common in the 19th century; for example, the elephant of Murten in 1866 also fell victim to this tactic.

Life and death in Venice
The first elephant († 1819 in Venice) came from one of the last court menageries established by Frederick I of Württemberg. After his death in 1816 and a year characterised by poor harvests and famine (the year without summer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer), Frederick's successor William I had deemed the exclusive animal husbandry, which included three elephants as well as a considerable number of large predators, too expensive and sold the menagerie to circus owners and animal exhibitors throughout Europe in November of the same year. In the meantime, one of the elephants had been killed and the carcass allocated to the royal natural history collection. Another elephant, together with a leopard, a bear and other exotic animals such as monkeys and parrots, was acquired by the Berlin animal showman Garnier, who managed to train the rather wild and unruly animal into a scholarly elephant that could perform all kinds of tricks. Over the next two years, Garnier travelled with the elephant to various fairs in Germany and Italy.
The traveller and naturalist Georg von Martens (1788-1872), founder of the Moosherbar in Stuttgart, saw the elephant in Vicenza and left an account of its death in Venice on 16 March 1819 in a footnote.[1] According to Martens, the elephant resisted his embarkation to Milan; irritated by the prodding of his attendants, he smashed his hut and threw boards at the men. In an attempt to lure the hungry animal with food, one of the guards was killed. Frightened by a volley of gunfire from the rushing military, the elephant took flight and ran into the Castello neighbourhood, where it got stuck in the hopeless alley Calle del Forno and then broke into a house. The stairs collapsed under the heavy animal as it tried to climb them. After more useless volleys of gunfire from his pursuers, the elephant kicked through the wooden door of the church of Sant'Antonin[2] and took refuge behind the pews. There it was shot with a cannon through a hole specially dug in the church wall, the bullet of which lodged in the large body. The news of the event was publicised in Venice and spread throughout Europe by newspapers. The skeleton and the stuffed skin of the elephant ended up in the natural history collection of the University of Padua.

Life and death in Geneva
In addition to the Württemberg elephant, Garnier owned a second one († 1820 in Geneva), which came from Bengal and which he had bought in London in 1814. The animal was gentle and docile and had only one tusk. Garnier left it to his daughter after acquiring the unlucky elephant from Stuttgart.




In May 1820, Mademoiselle Garnier's elephant performed his tricks in Geneva. He had been unusually restless due to shooting practice in a garrison close to the showground. On leaving the city, he suddenly panicked and was allowed to run back into the city in the hope that he would be easier to catch again, which the mademoiselle managed to do by luring him into the courtyard of the Bastion Hollande with treats. There the elephant began to run riot, knocking over ammunition carts and gun carriages, turning the towering wheels with its trunk and throwing cannonballs around. Although the garrison commander and the mayor, who had rushed over, had decided to let the elephant run wild, Mademoiselle Garnier, possibly remembering the devastation of the previous year in Venice, insisted on killing the animal. Repeated doses of poison, including arsenic, which the animal willingly consumed, were to no avail. As more and more onlookers began to gather, it was decided to shoot the elephant with a cannon. They broke a hole in the courtyard wall and shot the curious animal in the head with a cannonball. The skeleton and skin were taken to the natural history museum, the meat was distributed among the population, who reportedly enjoyed it despite the poison it contained."
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elefanten_von_Garnier



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