Cornelius I. (rhinoceros)
Cornelius I. (Engl .: Cornelius the First ) was a black rhinoceros , born in Granby Zoo in Granby , Quebec , east of Montreal in Canada , died on April 3, 2013 in Tyler , Texas . Between 1965 and 1993 it was the designated chairman of the Parti Rhinocéros (French rhinoceros party), which - meant as a satire - nonetheless got a remarkable number of votes in elections. In some constituencies, the party reached second place and won over 1 percent of the nationwide vote in the 1980 general election, but was never able to send a candidate to the lower house .
The founder of the party in 1963, Jacques Ferron, a doctor and author from Québec , who renounced his party chairmanship in favor of Cornelius, found commonalities between rhinos and politicians: they are equally thick-skinned, leisurely, gloomy, fast as the devil in danger and had big, hairy horns in the middle of their face. The name Cornelius is a play on the French word corne , the horn . The Parti Rhinocéros used a famous woodcut by Albrecht Dürer as its logo , on which they had added a French inscription: D'une mare à l'autre , a play on the Latin motto of Canada: a mari usque ad mare ( from sea to sea , from Psalm 72: 8); In French, mare means a pond , a pool .
In 1981 Cornelius came to the San Diego Wild Animal Park in exchange for a giraffe . A senior rhinoceros party member lodged a complaint with the US Embassy in Ottawa in 1984, speculating that the KGB was responsible for the early death of Cornelius' rhinoceros companion Stella . More recently, this wildlife park loaned the bull to the Caldwell Zoo in Tyler , Texas , where it died on April 3, 2013.
literature
- Jean-Francois Nadeau: En aparté - Le rhinocéros revient . In: Le Devoir , October 2, 2005
- Ruthven Tremain: The Animals' Who's Who . University of Michigan 1982, ISBN 0684176211 , p. 58.
Individual evidence
- ^ The Rhinoceros Party of Canada . bbc.co.uk, September 29, 2005.
- ^ The Rhinoceros Party. The Rebirth of the Ridiculous . CBC News, Aug. 8, 2007.
- ^ Ingrid Peritz: After years of near-extinction, the whacky Rhino party is back . In: The Globe and Mail , August 8, 2007.
- ^ Charles Campbell (May 1, 1985). Satirical party thunders off Canadian scene. The Associated Press PM cycle (accessed from LexisNexis on March 29, 2009)
- ↑ Kerri Compton: Caldwell Zoo's black rhino Cornelius has died ( Memento April 6, 2018 in the Internet Archive ). At: wmc.actionnews5.com , April 22, 2013 (accessed April 5, 2018)