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Atkins Menagerie in United Kingdom


Atkins Menagerie
Typecircus
Owner -1848: Thomas Atkins
Thomas Atkins
Country United Kingdom
Directors
Key People
Veterinarians
Elephant department
Head keepers
of elephants
Elephant keepers
Record history
History of updates2024-03-06
Latest document update2024-03-06 17:05:32
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Description

Atkins Menagerie, United Kingdom .


Comments / picturesAtkins menagerie was founded by Thomas Atkins (1763-1848).

Atkins frequented the St Bartholomew\'s Fair in London and even developed a rivalry with another exhibitor, George Wombwell. Once when Wombwell arrived at the fair, his elephant died and Atkins put up a sign "The Only Live Elephant in the Fair". Wombwell simply put up a scroll with the words "The Only Dead Elephant in the Fair" and explained that seeing a dead elephant was an even a rarer thing than a live one. The public, realising that they could see a living elephant at any time, flocked to see and generally poke the dead one! Throughout the fair Atkins' menagerie was largely deserted, much to his disgust.



In 1825 an unnamed keeper at Atkins’ Royal Menagerie in Britain entered a partitioned cage which held a lion and tigress and their offspring and interacted with them.37 William Hone observes how:

the man then took a short Whip, and after a smart lash or two upon
his back, the lion rose with a yawn . . . [and] by coaxing, and pushing
him about, he caused the lion to sit down, and while in that position
opened the animal’s ponderous jaws with his hands, and thrust his
face down into the lion’s throat, wherein he shouted, and there held
his head nearly a minute

This feat was subsequently claimed for Isaac Van Amburgh, clearly not the first handler to undertake it.39 Next the Atkins’ keeper had the
tigress jump numerous times through a two-foot (61 cm) diameter hoop. After some perseverance, the lion reluctantly followed. At the
end of the act, the keeper lay on the floor sandwiched between both animals.40 Regardless of moments of playful interaction and the act of
pretending to sleep designed to display the keeper’s compatibility with the lion and tiger, from the earliest menagerie acts, there was physical coercion with varying degrees of force used to bodily move lions and tigers. Pushing and handling came to typify menagerie human–animal big cat acts and underpinned the progression towards compliance and tameness by the end of the act.

References for records about Atkins Menagerie

Recommended Citation

Koehl, Dan (2025). Atkins Menagerie, Elephant Encyclopedia. Available online at https://www.elephant.se/location2.php?location_id=3334. (archived at the Wayback machine)

Sources used for this article is among others:



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