{"id":80081,"date":"2018-08-10T16:20:35","date_gmt":"2018-08-10T23:20:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=80081"},"modified":"2018-08-10T16:21:37","modified_gmt":"2018-08-10T23:21:37","slug":"john-hagenbeck-former-owner-of-the-dehiwela-zoo-exported-animals-and-humans-from-sri-lanka-for-display-overseas-ceylon-the-colonial-freak-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2018\/08\/10\/john-hagenbeck-former-owner-of-the-dehiwela-zoo-exported-animals-and-humans-from-sri-lanka-for-display-overseas-ceylon-the-colonial-freak-show\/","title":{"rendered":"John Hagenbeck (former owner of the Dehiwela Zoo) exported animals and humans from Sri Lanka for display overseas -Ceylon & The Colonial Freak Show"},"content":{"rendered":"

Courtesy see.this.onblerd.com<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

One of the most prominent of the human zoo operators was the Hamburg animal trader Carl Hagenbeck. He would go on expeditions in foreign countries and bring back both animals and people for European collections and display. The zoo in Hamburg still bears his name. In his memoirs, Carl Hagenbeck praised himself, writing, it was my privilege to be the first in the civilized world to present these shows of different races.\u201d \u00a0 Carl Hagenbeck, decided in 1874 to exhibit Samoan and Sami people as purely natural\u201d populations. In 1876, he sent a collaborator to the Sudan to bring back some wild beasts and Nubians.\u00a0John Hagenbeck (1866-1940) settled in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1891, when he was in his mid-twenties. He was a younger half-brother of the great German animal entrepreneur Carl Hagenbeck (1844-1913), “King of the Menagerie Owners” and founder in 1907 of the world\u2019s first open-plan zoo at Stellingen, near Hamburg, Germany.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0National Zoological Gardens of Sri Lanka was founded by\u00a0\u00a0John Hagenbeck<\/a>\u00a0in the late 1920s. It was closed at the beginning of\u00a0World War II<\/a>\u00a0in 1939 because the owner of\u00a0 Zoological Gardens\u00a0company was a German national.\u00a0During the second world war, The\u00a0Ceylon Zoological Gardens Company was liquidated in\u00a01936 and confiscated by the Ceylon Government\u00a0as “enemy property” and renamed\u00a0 as\u00a0Dehivela Gardens in Ceylon (Sri Lanka<\/a>).\u00a0\u00a0After\u00a0the liquidation of the Zoological Garden Company in 1936, the\u00a0 Ceylon (Sri Lanka) government acquired much of the animal collection and added it to the Dehiwala Zoo (Zoological Garden of\u00a0Ceylon<\/a>) collection. Although the\u00a0Dehiwala\u00a0\u00a0Zoo officially began operating in 1939. An impressive animal collection already existed there as part of Hagenback company’s holding area.\u00a0\u00a0John Hagenbeck<\/a>\u00a0 who\u00a0established the\u00a0Ceylon Zoological Gardens Compan<\/a>y\u00a0kept animals\u00a0 and\u00a0 sometimes\u00a0humans in transfer before being\u00a0exported to Europe and the US.<\/p>\n

Carl Hagenbeck<\/a>\u00a0was a German exotic animal businessman, who became famous for his conquering of the animal trade market during the mid to late 1800\u2019s. Due to the costs of acquiring and keeping animals, the financial implications started to worry Hagenbeck, and he began looking for other ways to alleviate the company\u2019s monetary strains.\u00a0Heinrich Leutemann<\/a>, an old friend of Hagenbeck suggested bringing along the people from the foreign lands to accompany the animals. The idea struck Hagenbeck as brilliant and he had a group of\u00a0Laplanders<\/a>\u00a0accompany his next shipment of Reindeer.\u00a0Carl Hagenbeck<\/a>\u00a0staged a public display in 1886 of\u00a0Sinhalese<\/a>\u00a0autochthones from Ceylon (Sri Lanka<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Besides owning several tea plantations in Ceylon, John Hagenbeck collected and exported exotic animals to the family zoo, as well as arranging for groups of Ceylonese to travel abroad with the wildly-popular Hagenbeck “ethnographic” exhibitions in the USA and elsewhere. John appears in Leonard Woolf\u2019s Growing, the memoir of the author\u2019s years in early twentieth century Ceylon as a civil servant: in 1909, while Woolf was stationed in Hambantota,<\/p>\n

Human zoos<\/strong>, also called\u00a0ethnological expositions<\/strong>, were 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century public exhibitions of humans, usually in a so-called natural or primitive state. The displays often emphasized the cultural differences between Europeans of\u00a0Western civilization<\/a>\u00a0and non-European peoples or with other Europeans who practiced a lifestyle deemed more primitive. Some of them placed\u00a0indigenous<\/a>\u00a0populations in a continuum somewhere between the\u00a0great apes<\/a>\u00a0and Europeans. Ethnological expositions are sometimes criticized and ascertained as highly degrading and\u00a0racist<\/a>, depending on the show and individuals involved.<\/p>\n

Ethnology studies in Germany took a new approach in the 1870s as human displays were incorporated into zoos. These exhibits were lauded as educational to the general population by the scientific community of the time<\/p>\n

The creator of the American\u00a0 Barnum & Bailey Circus continuously sensationalized atrocities for his own financial gain.\u00a0Barnum essentially founded American circus cruelty.\u00a0In 1850, Barnum sent two men from Boston to capture wild elephants in Ceylon (now known as Sri Lanka). The mission killed large numbers of the huge beasts,\u201d Barnum claimed in his autobiography. The elephants who died on the 12,000-mile long journey on ships from Colombo\u00a0to New York City were dumped overboard.\u00a0With a life of traveling and performing behind them, the elephants of the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus will live out their lives in retirement at the Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation, a sanctuary near Orlando, USA.<\/p>\n

The following articles explore some of the methods used to capture animals (Elephants, crocodiles, peacocks etc)in Ceylon. It is estimated that Hagenbecks exported over 250 elephants from Ceylon.<\/p>\n

Full Report\u00a0http:\/\/see.this.onblerd.com\/story\/2017\/02\/sri-lanka-ceylon-colonial-freak-show\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Courtesy see.this.onblerd.com One of the most prominent of the human zoo operators was the Hamburg animal trader Carl Hagenbeck. He would go on expeditions in foreign countries and bring back both animals and people for European collections and display. The zoo in Hamburg still bears his name. In his memoirs, Carl Hagenbeck praised himself, writing, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forum","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80081\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}