If you were interested in the wonders of the natural world during the 19th and early 20th centuries there were two places you could visit to feed your appetite for knowledge. The first of these was your local museum, where you could marvel at fossils and taxidermy of exotic animals like tigers or crocodiles. If you had a particularly good museum in your city it might even have mummies in it. Museums were there to encourage the public into gaining an education in history, the arts and the sciences for the ultimate advancement of mankind so there was a good chance you might learn something too. The second option had far less lofty ideals; it existed to make money and entertain. It was known by a number of names like the travelling show, the sideshow, the circus and the freak show.
Exposing the great unwashed to actual science or encouraging them to further study mattered little to most sideshow operators; in fact many of the attractions were designed to contradict popular scientific understanding. Put yourself in the mind of the average punter. Which attraction would you be more likely to pay money to see: something you could see in your local museum any time you wanted or a horse that can do maths by tapping its foot? My money would be on perhaps a little over half the people asked the question picking the horse purely because it’s not the sort of thing you see every day, but I bet a load more people would go for the horse if on posters there were taglines like “Science said it was IMPOSSIBLE, but it was WRONG!” screaming out at you. I know I’d certainly go and see the horse, then, if only to confirm to myself that the scientists were right and the horses ‘maths’ was no more than it following hand signals from its trainer.
Any and every scientific discovery and law was fair game so long as exploiting a dramatic-looking supposed contradiction could make a fair amount of publicity in the press and turn a profit for the show owner. So after the publication of Darwin’s theories of natural selection it was only to be expected that there would be sideshow exhibits that appeared to contradict his theory. That sideshow became known as ‘The Happy Family’ and was copied many times around the world. A Happy Family exhibit was when animals were placed in a pen with their natural predators with the animals showing very little animosity to each other, even drinking from the same water dish without batting an eyelid. Exhibitors of Happy Families would often draw attention to the fact that if their exhibit was to be believed, nature was certainly not red in tooth and claw and that Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ claims, which were at the time considered the main driving force of speciation, were based on a falsehood. Needless to say this patter worked very well in large cities where the closest you got to nature was occasionally finding a nest of rats in your mattress; but not so well in more rural areas and smaller towns where the punters were more likely to see just how red the teeth and claws were first hand. Of course the exhibits didn’t actually disprove any scientific theory; they even misinterpreted the meaning of survival of the fittest in the first place; but people were intrigued by the mix of predator and prey living in harmony.
The most famous example of The Happy Family was part of P. T. Barnum’s Greatest Show On Earth of which the shows 1892 guidebook boasted:
‘In this cage will be found cats playing harmlessly with mice; dogs, foxes, monkeys and rabbits peacefully eating food out of the same dish without harming each other; owls, eagles, vultures watching the frolics of squirrels, bats and small birds, their usual prey, without making an attempt to capture or kill them.’
Certainly, if the guidebook’s claims were true then it was a most remarkable exhibit, if not rather crowded. Barnum claimed that the animals were not unhealthy or drugged but there was a secret as how the predators lost their will to kill prey and the prey lost their fear. As part of his publicity, and knowing that his exhibit would have to stand head and shoulders above those of other shows Barnum started to claim that his exhibit was the original Happy Family. This was untrue as the Happy Family had been a British invention. Francis T. Buckland recorded two Happy Families in London in 1852; one at Charing Cross and the other at Waterloo Bridge. Both exhibitors claimed to have been the originators of the exhibit to Buckland so even Barnum’s claims of originality were unoriginal. It is highly likely that Barnum visited one or both of London’s Happy Families on one of his visits to England and being the showman that he was, easily worked out how the effect was achieved.
The great ‘secret’ to making a Happy Family exhibit was to just pick the laziest and most docile individual animals you could find, keep them very well fed and remove any animal that didn’t get along with the others. Even better results could be had by raising the animals together from infancy. With enough money, time, skill and luck a showman could put together an impressive exhibit filled with exotic animals that was sure to impress anyone who came to see it, throw in a bit of humbug about how “Science said it was IMPOSSIBLE, but it was WRONG!” on the posters and you have a surefire hit.
There are still several Happy Family exhibits around today. Until at least the 1990s there was even one in Coney Island, New York, and most work on exactly the same principles. Thankfully, though, most modern Happy Families have a more educational, ecological basis than in their heyday and give greater space and better living conditions to the animals and the practice of grouping animals that would not co-exist in the wild has had its day. The modern successor of the happy family exhibit are the exhibits in zoos and aquariums that attempt to recreate natural ecosystems and habitats and these are usually free of carnivores, lazy and well fed or not.
Exposing the great unwashed to actual science or encouraging them to further study mattered little to most sideshow operators; in fact many of the attractions were designed to contradict popular scientific understanding. Put yourself in the mind of the average punter. Which attraction would you be more likely to pay money to see: something you could see in your local museum any time you wanted or a horse that can do maths by tapping its foot? My money would be on perhaps a little over half the people asked the question picking the horse purely because it’s not the sort of thing you see every day, but I bet a load more people would go for the horse if on posters there were taglines like “Science said it was IMPOSSIBLE, but it was WRONG!” screaming out at you. I know I’d certainly go and see the horse, then, if only to confirm to myself that the scientists were right and the horses ‘maths’ was no more than it following hand signals from its trainer.
Any and every scientific discovery and law was fair game so long as exploiting a dramatic-looking supposed contradiction could make a fair amount of publicity in the press and turn a profit for the show owner. So after the publication of Darwin’s theories of natural selection it was only to be expected that there would be sideshow exhibits that appeared to contradict his theory. That sideshow became known as ‘The Happy Family’ and was copied many times around the world. A Happy Family exhibit was when animals were placed in a pen with their natural predators with the animals showing very little animosity to each other, even drinking from the same water dish without batting an eyelid. Exhibitors of Happy Families would often draw attention to the fact that if their exhibit was to be believed, nature was certainly not red in tooth and claw and that Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ claims, which were at the time considered the main driving force of speciation, were based on a falsehood. Needless to say this patter worked very well in large cities where the closest you got to nature was occasionally finding a nest of rats in your mattress; but not so well in more rural areas and smaller towns where the punters were more likely to see just how red the teeth and claws were first hand. Of course the exhibits didn’t actually disprove any scientific theory; they even misinterpreted the meaning of survival of the fittest in the first place; but people were intrigued by the mix of predator and prey living in harmony.
The most famous example of The Happy Family was part of P. T. Barnum’s Greatest Show On Earth of which the shows 1892 guidebook boasted:
‘In this cage will be found cats playing harmlessly with mice; dogs, foxes, monkeys and rabbits peacefully eating food out of the same dish without harming each other; owls, eagles, vultures watching the frolics of squirrels, bats and small birds, their usual prey, without making an attempt to capture or kill them.’
Certainly, if the guidebook’s claims were true then it was a most remarkable exhibit, if not rather crowded. Barnum claimed that the animals were not unhealthy or drugged but there was a secret as how the predators lost their will to kill prey and the prey lost their fear. As part of his publicity, and knowing that his exhibit would have to stand head and shoulders above those of other shows Barnum started to claim that his exhibit was the original Happy Family. This was untrue as the Happy Family had been a British invention. Francis T. Buckland recorded two Happy Families in London in 1852; one at Charing Cross and the other at Waterloo Bridge. Both exhibitors claimed to have been the originators of the exhibit to Buckland so even Barnum’s claims of originality were unoriginal. It is highly likely that Barnum visited one or both of London’s Happy Families on one of his visits to England and being the showman that he was, easily worked out how the effect was achieved.
The great ‘secret’ to making a Happy Family exhibit was to just pick the laziest and most docile individual animals you could find, keep them very well fed and remove any animal that didn’t get along with the others. Even better results could be had by raising the animals together from infancy. With enough money, time, skill and luck a showman could put together an impressive exhibit filled with exotic animals that was sure to impress anyone who came to see it, throw in a bit of humbug about how “Science said it was IMPOSSIBLE, but it was WRONG!” on the posters and you have a surefire hit.
There are still several Happy Family exhibits around today. Until at least the 1990s there was even one in Coney Island, New York, and most work on exactly the same principles. Thankfully, though, most modern Happy Families have a more educational, ecological basis than in their heyday and give greater space and better living conditions to the animals and the practice of grouping animals that would not co-exist in the wild has had its day. The modern successor of the happy family exhibit are the exhibits in zoos and aquariums that attempt to recreate natural ecosystems and habitats and these are usually free of carnivores, lazy and well fed or not.
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