On This Day in History: January 4

Electrocuting an elephant

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People are fucking sick. Here is an idea: let’s abuse the shit out of an elephant for the amusement of others, give her over to some drunk asshole of a handler, and when she acts out, we can electrocute her to death and make a movie out of it. Fun!

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: January 4, 1903--

Topsy the elephant was born in the wild around 1875 in Southeast Asia, captured, smuggled into the U.S., and proclaimed to be the first elephant born in America. They named her after an enslaved girl character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was oddly appropriate considering that chattel slavery gave people the legal right to murder their enslaved if they wanted.

Because she was abused, she gained a reputation as a “bad” elephant. Then in 1902, she killed a spectator. But the fucker was asking for it. James Blount was pissed to the gills and wandered his drunken belligerent ass into the tent where the elephants were tied up. He teased the elephants and threw sand in Topsy’s face. Then he burned the sensitive tip of her trunk with a lit cigar. She reacted by throwing him to the ground with her trunk and crushing him. Because fuck that guy.

She’d never killed before, but the newspapers made her out to be a serial murderer of men, proclaiming that she’d already killed a dozen times before. Topsy was sold and moved to Coney Island. There were two incidents involving her drunken handler, William Alt, letting her run loose and using her to terrorize a police station. I’ve been plenty drunk, but I’ve never been that drunk. Anyway, Alt was fired, and the park was all the fuck do we do with her now? They tried to give her away, but no one wanted the poor abused creature. Not even zoos.

Then they said, “Hey, let’s kill her and sell tickets!”

They were going to do it via hanging, but the president of the ASPCA said are you fucking kidding? No! They wanted to make sure she didn’t suffer too much, or that the execution wouldn’t be botched, so they went for the triple threat: electrocution, poison, and strangulation. Fifteen-hundred spectators and 100 photographers and press showed up to the horrid spectacle on January 4, 1903. They fed Topsy a bunch of cyanide-laced carrots, and then hit her with 6,600 volts for 10 seconds, which toppled her over. Then a steam-powered winch tightened two nooses about her neck to make sure she was dead.

The Edison Film Company recorded it as a 74-second documentary titled Electrocuting an Elephant. Terrible film. Two thumbs down.

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