All trivial fond records

lemoniceforever:

LAMPS - Bertha Walt

Surely one of the best songs out there about a woman being devoured by an elephant.

This made me think of other demonised elephants and, more specifically, their executions.

In 1903 Thomas Edison electrocuted “Topsy” after she killed three trainers (the last having tried to feed her a lit cigarette). Edison used Topsy’s death sentence as an opportunity to smear his rivals George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla, who were promoting the adoption of alternating current over Edison’s direct current. Edison hoped executing such a tremendous animal using AC— 6,600 volts to be exact— would spook the public into thinking the system was too dangerous. Edison filmed the stunt and it drew a crowd of over a thousand. Ultimately it gave him little advantage in the “War of the Currents”— but did aid in the development of the electric chair (a spiteful Edison suggested calling it the “Westinghouse chair.”)

And then there’s “Murderous Mary.” She was a circus elephant that could purportedly “play 25 tunes on the musical horns without missing a note.” Likely in musth, she crushed the skull of her inexperienced handler. Her owner, Charles Sparks, knew it would reflect badly on his circus if she wasn’t punished.

Mary was hung in Erwin, Tennessee on September 16, 1916. Some 2,500 spectators showed up to watch.

George Orwell wrote an essay called “Shooting An Elephant” in 1936. As the title suggests, the narrator, flanked by riotous townsfolk, shoots an elephant that had raided a Burmese village. He describes the experience:

At last, after what seemed a long time – it might have been five seconds, I dare say – he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay…I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.