Gertrude Lintz

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Gertrude Lintz , b. Davies (born April 1880 in Islington , † September 1968 in New York ), was an American dog breeder and animal owner with British roots. She became known in particular for keeping great apes, which she treated as her "children" while they were still relatively harmless and also carried them in public in human clothing.

Life

According to a newspaper article from 1933, Gertrude Davies wanted to become a singer and studied in Paris . An illness ended her career and she came to New York. When she was advised to take up a hobby as a distraction, she decided to breed dogs. Their first St. Bernard dogs were imported from Switzerland and established their successful breeding, which they named "Hercuveen" - a suitcase word from Hercules and Venus to emphasize the beauty and strength of these animals. She received her first chimpanzee around 1923 ; this monkey probably got into her hands through her friend, Captain Arthur Phillips. From this time on, Gertrude Davies collected, bred and trained numerous animals.

Gertrude Davies and the doctor William Lintz married in 1914. In 1923 they moved to Shore Road in Brooklyn . Gertrude Lintz claimed in her memoir that she lived in Charles van Brunt's country house , which was incorrect. It was the house of his brother Albert, in which Charles van Brunt had also spent some time in his youth. In the 1920s, Gertrude Lintz is said to have owned a house at 8514 Narrows Avenue.

Gertrude Lintz lived with her husband Dr. William Lintz and numerous animals on the large, multi-house estate on Shore Road, when an accident hit the headlines in 1934: An employee found Lintz's chimpanzees lifeless and called the fire department, believing the animals were from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by an oven. The police and emergency services were alerted and resuscitation measures initiated. Almost all of the chimpanzees survived, only one monkey named Yonnie could not be saved. In the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of March 16, 1934, the inmates were listed in the Lintz couple's private zoos. In addition to the chimpanzees Yonnie, Jiggs, Johnny, Joe, Buster, Susie, Baby and Mario, William and Gertrude Lintz also kept two gorillas, 30 St. Bernard dogs, 200 rabbits, 300 pigeons, 400 tropical fish, three canaries, two owls, one at that time Sealyham Terrier and an African African Gray Parrot. A later newspaper article partly contains different figures: According to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of July 17, 1938, eleven other conspecifics were affected in addition to the named chimpanzee Jiggs. Lintz also kept a leopard at the time of the accident.

A year after the gas accident, William Lintz filed for divorce because he could no longer endure this menagerie, the destruction of his private life by the curious and the ruin of his reputation as a doctor due to his wife's excessive animal husbandry. The Lintz 'domicile was apparently later demolished, the property divided up and rebuilt in the 1960s.

Jiggs

The chimpanzee Jiggs, who had survived the gas accident in 1934, died four years later from police bullets. The then seven-year-old ape had been fed a cleaning agent containing cyanide in its cage and had been able to free itself, raging with pain. Then he had invaded the living area of ​​the house. After Gertrude Lintz tried to calm him down for five hours in the bathroom, she called the police and Jiggs was shot. After this incident, Lintz stated that she no longer wanted to keep animals.

Lintz's gorillas

Through the captain of the freighter West Key Bar Arthur Phillips, Gertrude Lintz came into possession of her two young gorillas: Massa came into her hands in 1931 and Buddy followed on December 28, 1932. Lintz was still living in her home at 8365 Shore Road, Brooklyn . From 1934 she used a second domicile in Miami for the winter months , to which she took the monkeys with her. The basement on Shore Road had been converted into an apartment for Lintz's employee Richard Kroener and other servants. Kroener also kept his tropical fish in the basement and had his butterfly collection there. Lintz also used the former billiard room to store her cups and trophies for successful St. Bernard breeding, etc. Finally, the great apes were quartered there.

Both gorillas were quite young when they came into Lintz's care, and both were in poor shape. While Massa first had to be cured of pneumonia , Buddy fell victim to an acid attack that almost cost him his eyesight and led to permanent disfigurement of his face. Lintz kept Massa with him until 1935. After inadvertently frightening the animal and thereby provoking a life-threatening attack, she kept it in a cage and put it up for sale. Wrongly mistaken for a female, the young gorilla ended up in the Philadelphia Zoo , where it was discovered, in an attempt to socialize it with the gorilla Bamboo, that Massa's sex had been wrongly determined. He spent the next decades of his life in solitary confinement and was considered the oldest gorilla kept in captivity when he died at the age of 54. Buddy lived in Lintz's household until 1937. After crawling into her bed for fear of a thunderstorm, this gorilla was also abolished. He ended up as a circus animal and died around the age of 20. The fates of the two primates served as a template for the film Buddy , which was shot in 1997 and in which Rene Russo played the role of Gertrude Lintz.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Selma Warlick, Former Singer Keeps Zoo in Her Back Yard; Breeds St. Bernards , February 19, 1933 in Brooklyn Daily Eagle ( digitized )
  2. ↑ a b c d Henry, The Crazy Chimp Lady of Shore Road , March 21, 2016 at www.heyridge.com
  3. ↑ Jennifer Gould Keil, $ 2.8M Brooklyn house has heart-shaped pool, wild history , June 27, 2019 on nypost.com
  4. ↑ The newspaper article mentions nine chimpanzees, but only eight names are mentioned. The later article from 1938 also states that two chimpanzees died in the accident.
  5. ↑ Rescue Squad Spees Aid to Chimps Gassed in Zoo of Bay Ridge Women , March 16, 1934 in Brooklyn Daily Eagle , pp. 1 and 3 ( digitized version )
  6. ↑ a b Chimpanee Poisoned By Person He Trusted , July 17, 1938 in Brooklyn Daily Eagle , p. 3 ( digitized version )
  7. ↑ John E. Cooper, Gordon Hull, Gorilla Pathology and Health , Academic Press 2017, ISBN 0128020393 , p. 577 ( limited preview in Google Book Search)
  8. ↑ Barbara Ensor, Monkey Business , June 2, 1997 in New York Magazine , p. 15 ( limited preview in Google Book Search)
  9. ↑ Massa the Gorilla on de.findagrave.com
personal data
SURNAME Lintz, Gertrude
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lintz, Gertrude Ada; Lintz Davies, Gertrude; Lintz Davies, Gertrude Ada; Davies, Gertrude (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American dog breeder, pet owner, and author
DATE OF BIRTH April 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Islington
DATE OF DEATH September 1968
Place of death New York City