Animal-Man

Last week the officers and friends of the largest zoo in the world met for their annual garden party, in Bronx Zoological Park, New York City. There were tea for the grownups, amiable camels and ponies for the children to ride, and movies of the animals for everyone to see. But also there was sad news. Dr. William Temple Hornaday, for 30 years presiding genius and animal-man of the Bronx, announced his resignation as Director. He was 72 years old and wanted peace and quiet.

His duties were easily and responsibly transferred to Dr. Reid Blair, a Philadelphia-born veterinarian with a McGill University training and a splendid War record as chief “vet” with the Fourth Army Corps, who has been Dr. Hornaday’s second-in-command these four years. But the Hornaday personality and reputation are not to be duplicated in every generation.

It was while he was studying at Iowa State College that William Hornaday, a vigorous, tar-haired Hoosier, came upon the works of Naturalist John J. Audubon and determined thenceforth to devote himself, not to natural history in a scientist’s closet, but todiscovering and teaching popularly the wonders of the animal kingdom. He studied zoology and the keeping of museums in Europe. He obtained a post as taxidermist at the U. S. National Museum in Washington. In 1886 it suddenly drawned on him that the buffalo-hide hunters had nearly completed their task of exterminating the once-thunderous bison herds of the western plains. He got himself commissioned to collect for mounting the family group still to be seen in Washington. The vivid story of “Our Last Buffalo Hunt,” and of many another hunt in the spacious Hornaday odyssey of which it was an early episode, was published in a book just lately.*

Dr. Hornaday has studied and collected wild life in virtually every retreat and game paradise of the world. He knows from personal acquaintance the cave-birds of Trinidad; the crocodiles of Florida and Venezuela; the elephants of Africa and India; the musk ox and his ugly tropical cousin, the water buffalo, which stalks humans. He has collected turtles and their eggs at Key West and mountain goat photographs and horns in the Shoshones. One of the most readable chapters he ever wrote is called “Game-Eating Adventures,” beginning with the hump-backed whale luncheon given by Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn and Explorer Roy Chapman Andrews at the American Museum of Natural History (Manhattan), and running a terrific, far-flung menu of elephant, loggerhead turtle, capybara (large South American rodent), howling-monkey, armadillo, iguana (lizard), Orinoco crocodile, diamond-back rattlesnake, stewed octopus, argus pheasant and muntjac (“barking-deer”) in Borneo, sambar and gaur (deer) and manis (scaly anteater) in India.

Besides shooting, eating and stuffing game, Dr. Hornaday has long-been active in preserving it, getting sanctuaries set aside for it in the West, fighting plumage hunters, lobbying for protection laws.

The day of his resignation at the Bronx, they asked Dr. Hornaday to which family of his vast animal population he was most devoted. Without hesitation he replied, “The orangutan,” but admitted that the chimpanzee and elephant came close seconds for intelligence. “As for the worst animals I have ever known—I hate to speak ill of any of them, they all do the best they can—but of all the animals that breathe the one I hate 24 hours a day is the domestic rat. And his vices all come from association with man. . . . People would love ani-mals better if they knew them better.”

In behalf of the huge public for which Dr. Hornaday laid out, stocked and expanded the great Bronx Zoo, the fatherly New York Times said: “If the vanishing wild life that he has labored to save could know that their great good friend was leaving a post that had given him so much authority as their foremost champion, there would be mourning on the ranges, in the high woods and among the Sierras. . . . ”

*A WILD-ANIMAL ROUND-UP—William T. Hornaday—Scribncr ($5).