SINTESIS DE DIAGNOSTICO Y TENDENCIAS AMBIENTALES EN LA REGION

Hunting, aristocracy and displays of wealth, power and prestige are also central to the development of the natural history museum in the nine-teenth century. The most spectacular crowd pleasers in the early museums were large carnivores, preferably those killed in the wild in the

‘romantic, violent, and dangerous process of confrontation and conquest’ in big game hunting.⁵⁷Indeed, the stuffed animals on display in museums can be interpreted as symbolic of imperial colonization and the annexation of wild places. According to Harriet Ritvo, each dead wild animal ‘represented a bloody triumph in the field . . . horns and hides, mounted heads and stuffed bodies, clearly alluded to the violent heroic underside of imperialism’.⁵⁸ The desire for trophies to fill personal holdings drove collectors to have large animals killed to complete their roster of wild specimens, while explorers financed their adventures by hunting and selling animals and by trafficking which devastated wildlife in colonial areas.⁵⁹ Even famous statesmen and politicians took part in killing and collecting wildlife. As head of a scientific expedition to Africa in 1909, Theodore Roosevelt collected 14,000 specimens of mammals, birds, reptiles and fish for the Smithsonian Institution.⁶⁰ Particularly proud of the specimens of large game animals he killed for the Smith-sonian, he boasted that ‘no other expedition of the kind has ever come back from Africa or Asia with a better collection of specimens than we brought back . . . the skins [and]. . . skeletons, of the square-mouthed rhinoceros, reticulated giraffe, giant eland, bongo, northern sable antelope, white-withered lechwe antelope and Vaughn’s kob . . . are unri-valed in any European museum’.⁶¹

Animal skins and skeletons were essential elements in the reconstruction of wildlife for museum display. Early taxidermy was a scientific endeavour, a prized skill for naturalists and zoologists who were interested in preserving

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animal specimens for study. When introduced into the nineteenth-century museum, taxidermy provided a way to display a story about the relation-ship between culture and nature, a story similar to the older exhibits of ecological relationships between animals and plants. In a description of the American Museum of Natural History’s African Hall, a collection of twenty-eight African dioramas representing most of the large mammals on the continent, Donna Haraway notes that taxidermy played a critical and complex role in the coordination of the exhibit, beginning in the wilder-ness when the animals were hunted down and ending in the museum as a finished diorama.⁶²

Haraway recounts how Carl Akeley, the early twentieth-century artist, scientist, taxidermist and hunter, carefully selected wild animals to kill for mounting as natural history exhibits.⁶³ The search centred on finding a perfect animal, a prize trophy specimen, usually an adult male. Passed over as unremarkable were females and the young of all species (unless needed to compose a ‘family’ group), elephants with asymmetrical tusks, animals with less than beautiful colours and small animals. There was a hierarchy of desired game animals: lions, elephants and giraffes were the preferred species, but the most prized specimen was the gorilla. Haraway describes a few days in one of Akeley’s gorilla hunt expeditions as an ongoing search for the best possible animals to photograph (for the con-struction of a realistic diorama) and finally kill (to be stuffed and posed according to the ‘action’ recorded by the camera). She notes that Akeley and his hunting party had slaughtered or attempted to slaughter every primate they had encountered since arriving in the area. On the first day of the hunt, Akeley killed and skinned a gorilla, and made a death mask of the animal, useful in a realistic reproduction of life after death. On the second day, he missed two males, but succeeded in killing a female and his attendants killed her baby. On the third day, Akeley took his camera along and photographed a group of gorillas for about 200 feet of film, but that became boring after a while, so ‘finally, feeling that I had about all I could expect from that band, I picked out one that I thought to be an immature male . . . I shot and killed it and found, much to my regret, that it was a female’.⁶⁴ After Akeley had his fill of gorilla hunting, he summoned the rest of the party waiting in camp to come up to hunt gorilla, and one of the hunters killed a large silverback male, a monumental animal now stuffed and on display in the African Hall. As part of the gorilla group diorama, the Giant of Karisimbi is mounted against a naturalistic African backdrop and rises above the other gorillas in the scene ‘in a chest-beating gesture of alarm and an unforgettable gaze in spite of the handicap of glass eyes’.⁶⁵

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The notion of the animal’s gaze is central to the visitor’s experience in the Natural History Museum. Haraway notes that each of the twenty-eight dioramas in the African Hall has at least one animal that looks directly back at the viewer. And even though a glass partition separates viewer from the viewed, the gaze invites ‘visual penetration . . . The animal is frozen in a moment of supreme life.’⁶⁶Similar attempts to stage lifelike appearances for dead animals are undertaken in trophy photography. While the Giant of Karisimbi’s head was held up by the hunter and his wife for a trophy shot after the kill, it was a clearly dead body that was being photographed, the gorilla’s jaw hanging slack, his body bloated and heavy.⁶⁷In a study of the display of dead trophy animals in contemporary hunting magazines, Amy Fitzgerald and I found hundreds of images of recently killed animals carefully posed to look alive – eyes open, heads turned alertly toward the camera, legs tucked neatly under the body to simulate the appearance of resting in the field.⁶⁸All evidence of blood and wounds was concealed, and some animals were staged as if performing live behaviours, such as the propped-up dead deer with straw stuffed in his mouth to convey the appearance of eating. Often the animal’s body was superfluous – the trophy prize was a set of spectacular antlers, and the most gruesome animal images were those of severed deer heads prominently displayed as fresh ‘cut-offs’

being carried from the hunting site attached to the hunter’s backpack or lined up on the lawn back at home. We con-cluded that the trophy images conveyed the message that animal bodies are highly objec-tified in the hunting discourse, decapitated and dismembered with body parts displayed as dec-oration or household objects, such as elephant tail flyswatters or elephant foot waste bins (see illus. 60).

Rarely is there any attempt to recreate or simulate the image of life for disparaged animals in the hunting discourse. For example, in our study of contemporary Looking at Animals in Human History

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60 Elephant foot being used as a waste bin.

trophy photographs, the triumph over worrisome predators was cele-brated, their bodies displayed ‘clearly dead . . . bobcats and foxes held triumphantly upside down for the camera, coyotes flung across human shoulders like bags of dirty laundry’.⁶⁹Thus, while the big game hunting of the early twentieth century was predicated on heroic confrontation between hunter and prey, perceptions of predatory animals in the US encouraged the killing of predators using any means possible. Based on long-standing fears of wilderness areas, worries about the safety of livestock and maintaining control over animals and land, the extermination of pred-ators, particularly large-bodied mammals, has been common in the US since the first settlers arrived.⁷⁰ With bounties on ‘vermin’ a major tool of game management, the US Forest Service hired trappers to reduce predator populations, and in 1915 Congress appropriated money for predator control, directing the Bureau of Biological Survey to kill the killers, with the new programme quickly developing into a ‘semi-inde-pendent extermination company for western ranchers’.⁷¹ The disdain for predators was widespread. Thomas R. Dunlap writes that Ernest Thompson Seton, animal advocate and nature writer, depicted wolves as ravenous, dan-gerous outlaws; William Hornaday, an advocate of the preservation of wild animals, claimed that falcons were at their best stuffed, owls were robbers and murderers, and the wolf was cunning, cruel and cowardly; even the conservationist Aldo Leopold argued in the 1920s for the total elimination of large predators from New Mexico.⁷²

Bountied and baited, the last wolf in New England was killed in Maine in 1860, and by 1905 wolves were rare in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.⁷³ The wolf-slaughter frenzy killed other species as well. According to Jody Emel, poisons such as strychnine and Compound 1080 (sodium fluoroac-etate) not only killed wolves but also dogs, children and the horses who ate the grass that the wolves had salivated on as they died.⁷⁴

The outcomes of predator control are proudly displayed in photographs from the 1920s. For example, in a 1921 photograph entitled ‘Eagle’s Nest Catch’ (illus. 61), three tiers of coyote bodies are displayed on a wood and stone slab frame in Sweetwater County, Wyoming. Two bandoliers of rifle cartridges are draped below a dead bobcat, and two badgers lie on the ground near a tripod of rifles. Illus. 62, a photograph taken in 1925, is an elaborate display of slaughtered predators that is intended to be humorous.

The bodies of dead coyotes are carefully manipulated, tied with ropes and positioned hanging from and draped across an automobile, with one of the bodies propped behind the steering wheel as if driving the car of carcasses.

The mass slaughter of coyotes had a devastating effect on the local ecology. In 1927, for example, millions of mice descended upon Kern

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61 Wyoming State hunters’ Eagle’s Nest Catch, 1921.

An entire wall is clad with the corpses of coyotes.

62 Animal carcasses on an automobile, 1925. A car is decorated with shot coyotes, including one posed behind the steering wheel.

County, California, unchecked by any predators because two years earlier the Bureau of Biological Survey had slaughtered all of the coyotes in the area while the farmers regularly killed the local hawks and owls.⁷⁵ But it wasn’t until the 1950s that public and scientific opinion challenged the predator eradication policy; until then almost everyone believed that predators would, and should, be eliminated and preserved only in special locations set aside for scientific study or public viewing,⁷⁶ places such as the zoo.