Carl Hagenbeck

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Carl Hagenbeck
Born (1844-06-10)June 10, 1844
Germany
Died April 14, 1913(1913-04-14) (aged 68)
Hamburg, Germany
Nationality German
Known for Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus Tierpark Hagenbeck
Parents Claus Gottfried Carl Hagenbeck

Carl Hagenbeck (June 10, 1844 - April 14, 1913) was a German merchant of wild animals who supplied many European zoos, as well as P.T. Barnum.[1] He created the modern zoo with animal enclosures without bars that were closer to their natural habitat.[2] The transformation of the zoo architecture initiated by him is known as the Hagenbeck revolution.[3] Hagenbeck founded Germany's most successful privately owned zoo, the Tierpark Hagenbeck, which moved to its present location in Hamburg's Stellingen quarter in 1907. He was a pioneer in displaying humans next to animals in as human zoos.

Biography

He was born on June 10, 1844 to Claus Gottfried Carl Hagenbeck (1810–1887) a fishmonger who ran a side business buying and selling exotic animals.[4]

When Hagenbeck was 14, his father gave him some seals and a polar bear.[4][5] His collection of animals grew until he needed large buildings to keep them in. Hagenbeck left his home in Hamburg to go with hunters and explorers to jungles and snow-clad mountains. He captured animals in nearly every land in the world. In 1874, he decided to exhibit Samoan and Sami people (called then by the derogatory name "Laplanders") as "purely natural" populations, with their tents, weapons, sleds, aside a group of reindeer.[6][7]

In 1875, Hagenbeck began to exhibit his animals in all the large cities of Europe as well as in the United States.

In 1876, he sent a collaborator to the Egyptian Sudan to bring back some wild beasts and Nubians. The Nubian exhibit was very successful in Europe, and toured Paris, London, and Berlin. He also dispatched an agent to Labrador to secure a number of "Esquimaux" (Inuit) from the settlement of Hopedale; these Inuit were exhibited in his Hamburg Tierpark.[6] Hagenbeck's exhibit of human beings, considered as "savages", in a "natural state," was the probable source of inspiration for Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire's similar "human zoo" exhibition in the Jardin d'acclimatation in Paris. Saint-Hilaire organized in 1877 two "ethnological exhibitions," presenting Nubians and Inuit to the public, thus succeeding to double the entrees of the zoo.[6]

Hagenbeck also trained animals to display and sell to circuses at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, in 1893, and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904. Hagenbeck's circus was one of the most popular attractions. His collection included large animals and reptiles. Many of the animals were trained to do tricks. He crossbred in 1900 a female lion with a Bengal tiger, and sold the hybrid for $2 million to the Portuguese zoologist Bisiano Mazinho. Hagenbeck's trained animals also performed at amusement parks on New York City's Coney Island prior to 1914.

However, Hagenbeck dreamed of a permanent exhibit where animals could live in surroundings much like their natural homes. Despite the presence of the Zoological Garden of Hamburg, Hagenbeck opened his great zoo, the Tierpark Hagenbeck at Stellingen, near Hamburg in 1907. [5] In 1909-1910 he supervised the building of the Giardino Zoologico in Rome. Today his ideas are followed by most large zoos.

In 1905, Hagenbeck used his outstanding skills as an animal collector to capture a thousand camels for the German Empire to use in Africa. He described his adventures and his methods of capturing and training animals in a book, Beasts and Men, published in 1908.

He died on April 14, 1913 in Hamburg.[1]

See also



The standard author abbreviation Hagenbeck is used to indicate this individual as the author when citing a zoological name.[8]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Carl Hagenbeck. Famous Animal Dealer and Exhibitor Dies in Hamburg.". New York Times. April 14, 1913. Retrieved 2008-07-22. "Carl Hagenbeck, the animal collector and senior partner of the ... menagerie and park at Stellingen, near Hamburg died to-day." 
  2. ↑ "Hagenbeck Tierpark und Tropen-Aquarium". Zoo and Aquarium Visitor. Retrieved 2008-07-22. "The founder and his idea Carl Hagenbeck built what no other dared dream of. In 1907, the Hamburg man opened the first barless zoo in the world. As early as the end of the nineteenth century, this son of a fishmonger had the idea of showing animals no longer caged up but in open viewing enclosures. In his zoo of the future, nothing more than unseen ditches were to separate wild animals from members of the public. Carl Hagenbeck patented this idea in 1896. Nine years later his dream was to come true in Hamburg-Stellingen. The revolutionary open viewing enclosures and panoramas were in fact ridiculed in professional circles but took the public's breath away. Hagenbeck's zoo is considered to have prepared the way for today's wildlife adventure parks." 
  3. ↑ "Managing Love and Death at the Zoo: The Biopolitics of Endangered Species Preservation", Australian Humanities Review, Issue 50, May 2011
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 46;Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Chisholm 1911.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Human Zoos, by Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaire, in Le Monde diplomatique, August 2000 French
  7. ↑ Savages and Beasts - The Birth of the Modern Zoo, Nigel Rothfels, Johns Hopkins University Press
  8. ↑ Online version of the Code of International Council of Zoological Nomenclature

Further reading

 Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Hagenbeck, Carl". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press 

  • Carl Hagenbeck, Beasts and men. Being Carl Hagenbeck's experiences for half a century among wild animals. (London & New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912).
  • Eric Ames, Carl Hagenbeck's Empire of Entertainments (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2009)
  • Edward Alexander, “Carl Hagenbeck and His Stellingen Tierpark: The Moated Zoo,” in: Edward Alexander, Museum Masters: Their Museums and Their Influence. (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1983), pp. 311–340.
  • Herman Reichenbach, “A Tale of Two Zoos: The Hamburg Zoological Garden and Carl Hagenbeck’s Tierpark,” in: R. J. Hoage and William A. Deiss, eds. New Worlds, New Animals. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 51–62.
  • Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
  • Reptiles of the world by Raymond L. Ditmar talks about him capturing most of the Gavhrials found on exhibit.

Spartaco Gippoliti 2004 Carl Hagenbeck's plan for Rome Zoo - and what became of it. Int. Zoo News 51: 24-28.

External links

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