Travelling zoos as knowledge mediators?

Newspapers regularly depicted travelling zoos as places of instruction. Indeed, they were seen as valuable for schoolchildren’s education because they could learn about the animals’ lives, anatomy, and behaviours. Menagerie owners liked to reinforce this perception and provided specific information about the animals in their catalogues. Ménagerie Pianet’s catalogue, for example, describes a panther with “green and evil eyes,” along with its nocturnal habits and habitats (MUCEM). They were motivated to support educational knowledge not only out of public goodwill, but also for economic reasons, as it served to promote their business and enlarge their audience (Cowie 2013).

Special performances were organized for families and children during the day as regular shows usually took place around 8 or 9 in the evening. Menageries also frequently allowed schoolchildren free entrance or offered them a price reduction. In 1880, for example, 3,600 children of the communal schools in Liège (Belgium) were invited to see a show and visit the exotic animals during its days-long run. This high number of visitors seems to indicate that school boards and municipalities had no moral objections to such menageries, nor perceived them as indecent.

In Antwerp at that time, officials similarly banned animal trainers from performing public shows inside the animals’ cages. Such objections were very local and temporary, and apparently had little impact on other cities. In Geneva, for example, children were still granted access to menageries during the 1890s. The access to “edutainment” — to use a modern word — thus depended on the viewpoints of local city or school administrators.

Exotic animals have always fascinated people. In the nineteenth century, they were appropriated as symbols of colonialism, power, control, civic pride, luxury, and prestige (Grigson 2018). This led to them being commonly depicted in the form of paintings, drawings, engravings, and later on in photographs, books and periodicals, objects, and moving pictures (Crane & Fletcher 2014).

Accordingly, painters often visited menageries to familiarize themselves with the features of exotic animals, such as the two Swiss painters Auguste-Henri Berthoud and Urs Eggenschwyler — who was hailed as a “famous lion painter” in some newspapers (L’Ami 1889). Artists-in-training, such as from the Ecole des arts industriels in Geneva, and photographers profited from visits to Ménagerie Pianet as well. Some photographers photographed Pianet’s animals to spread around to animal painters and sculptors for use as models for their artworks. One who did so during the early 1880s was Auguste Petit.

Aside from schoolchildren, families, and artists, scientists also profited from Ménagerie Pianet’s presence. The practical knowledge the Pianet brothers obtained by their daily care of a large variety of exotic animals and the cooperation they provided to scientists formed the basis for scientific research and knowledge creation about the natural world. These scientists could be employees of universities or other scientific establishments; some were independent scholars.

For instance, the Frenchman and amateur psychologist Pierre Hachet-Souplet was interested in the psychology of animals, a newly developing field in the late nineteenth century (Chapuis 2016). He was not affiliated with any university, but he promoted himself as the founder and director of the Institut de psychologie zoologique. Although the institute did not last long, Hachet-Souplet did independently publish several books about animal psychology that became widely known. Academically trained psychologists intrigued by his experimental methods of observing animal behaviour also read these works.

For some of his experiments, Hachet-Souplet relied on animal trainers, finding them through advertisements. He invited (itinerant) menageries and zoos to visit his “manège-laboratoire” — which moved often and was also rather short-lived. One of the people he received in his laboratory was none other than Emile Pianet. In addition, Hachet-Souplet and Emile wrote letters to each other more than once about topics such as infanticide in exotic animals or about the reasons animals’ behaviours and moods could quickly change and lead to dangerous situations.

Natural scientists also benefited from Ménagerie Pianet by collecting samples from the animals for their research. Among them was Louis Georges Neumann, a professor at the veterinary college in Toulouse, who later made important contributions to the field of parasitology. His large collection of parasites contains one he acquired from Ménagerie Pianet on 3 May 1892: the “sarcoptes scabiei du lion” (a type of mite found on lions). This particular sample also travelled to other scientists, such as the Paris-based Édouard Louis Trouessart, who in turn sent it to the Italian biologist Giovanni Canestrini.

Other scientists collected other parts of animals. For example, Louis Guinard, the head of the physiology department at the faculty of medicine in Lyon, used exotic animals from Ménagerie Pianet in his research about the toxicity of various types of animal urine. He specifically thanked “Mr. Pianet, whose menagerie is currently in Lyon” in an 1893 paper for allowing him to have urine samples from the animals (Guinard 1893).

Deceased exotic animals from menageries also contributed to scientific knowledge as menagerie owners, including the Pianet family, often donated or sold them to scientific institutions across Europe, where they could then be dissected and examined. Bidel, for example, donated a lion and a polar bear to the Université de Liège in Belgium.

Natural history museums also quite often received animals originating from menageries. This enlarged their collection for further study and dissection, as well as for public outreach when the animals were exhibited. Some museums took recurring donations. Between 1873 and 1900, the Musée d’histoire naturelle de Toulouse received nineteen specimens from Ménagerie Pianet, including python eggs and sawfish, as well as the skeleton and skin of lions and jaguars. Such donations enriched the scientific community’s understanding of the natural world.

Itinerant menagerie owners, with their practical knowledge of exotic species and their willingness to share their insights and facilitate access to their animals, contributed to the circulation and mediation of different forms of knowledge. Menageries were a hub where practical, educational, artistic, and scientific knowledge converged.

While these short-term and erratic exchanges did not necessarily lead to any astonishing scientific breakthroughs still remembered today, they were useful for different groups of people: from children to adults, and from artists to scientists. Itinerant menageries’ presence, thus, impacted people’s lives and their knowledge and understanding of the natural world. They influenced the everyday knowledge of ordinary people perhaps even more than scientific development and deserve a spot in the history of knowledge, particularly with the field’s focus on knowledge outside the academy.