Elephant from Murten

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The elephant hunt in Murten, 1866

The elephant von Murten († June 29, 1866 ) was a circus elephant that killed its keeper in the small Swiss town of Murten in the canton of Friborg and was then put to death by a cannonball. The skeleton is in the Natural History Museum in Bern .

prehistory

On the occasion of a weekly market, the American traveling circus Bell & Myers stopped in Murten on June 27, 1866 and gave a performance the following day. The attraction were two trained elephants, a female and a male animal, performing tricks. Since the place was small and the circus show was already very well attended, the company decided not to make another, less profitable show and decided to move on the next day. In the early hours of the morning the male elephant killed his keeper , who had been looking after him for 14 years, and ran out of his accommodation, a municipal coach house , into the Murtner Gassen. The elephant had already shown aggressive behavior in the past, in which it had killed a horse and displayed an uncontrollable destructiveness. Presumably he was in musth , a testosterone-related arousal phase that only occurs in adult bull elephants.

The elephant hunt and its consequences

The persecution by the circus operators and the Murten citizens who supported them remained unsuccessful. For a long time the unrestrained animal ran back and forth and caused tumult among the residents. The persecutors succeeded in locking the elephant in by building barricades in an alley. The circus owner decided to have him killed. Around noon on June 29, a cannon, a six-pounder with ammunition, ordered in Freiburg , was brought into position and fired. The bullet hit the animal fatally, it died instantly. After the killed elephant handler was buried in the Murten cemetery that afternoon, the circus moved on and left the elephant's carcass to the Murten people.

As in the case of one of the two elephants by Garnier , who were also killed by cannons in cities at the beginning of the 19th century, and later by Castor and Pollux in Paris in 1870 , the meat of the animal was given to the citizens of the city for consumption sold. The elephant skin was prepared so that the pachyderm could be exposed against entry. A pavilion was built for this purpose. The city council, however, did not see an exhibition as profitable and sold the stuffed elephant together with the separately prepared skeleton to the museum in Bern for CHF 2900 . The city's costs for the elephant up to then amounted to 3316 francs and 99 cents . The pavilion was demolished.

Lore

The stuffed elephant disappeared without a trace when the museum moved in 1940. The skeleton, which has particularly large tusks, belongs to the collection of the Anatomical Institute of the University of Bern , which has given its holdings to the Natural History Museum as a permanent loan. It can be viewed there today.

The event is passed down as an elephant hunt by Murten in accounts by eyewitnesses, newspaper articles and minutes of the council meetings. Hermann Schöpfer compiled the documents in 1974, including the report written in 1868 by the local locksmith Johann Frey. The original manuscript of this detailed account has been lost; a copy in Murtner's private collection was preserved. Stephan Oettermann reproduced this report in full in 1982.

The lower part of the Rathausgasse in Murten is still known today as "Elefantengasse" in memory of the event there.

To mark the 150th anniversary of the events, a walk-in sculpture by the artist Beat Breitenstein was erected in June 2016, an elephant figure made from several hundred panels of oak and steel beams. She stands in front of the Murtner Museum.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ After: Johann Frey, Schlosser in Murten, 1868; in: Oettermann (1982) pp. 175-180.
  2. ^ According to newspaper report Murtenbieter of December 1, 1867; based on: Oettermann (1982) p. 180.
  3. ↑ Oettermann (1982) p. 181.
  4. ↑ Schöpfer (1974), pp. 254-260; Oettermann (1982), pp. 175-182 .; Footnote 343b p. 212.
  5. ↑ Luigi Jorio: The elephant, the cannon and the slaughterhouse of Murten. In: swissinfo.ch. June 27, 2016. Retrieved June 28, 2016 .
  6. ↑ Martina Kammermann: Murten has an elephant again. In: Berner Zeitung. Retrieved June 28, 2016 .