Biology and the beast? The white man’s quest for physical dominance in early twentieth-century America

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the relatively nascent world of animal history, the present article seeks to demonstrate how interactions between humans and nonhumans served to both reinforce and destabilise ideas of masculinity within American society. It does so through an examination of three unusual athletic case studies, spanning the period 1893 to 1926. Beginning with Eugen Sandow’s infamous wrestling bout with Commodore the lion, the article goes on to explore the phenomenon of bear wrestling within the American circus before finally discussing John Bauman’s 1923 and 1926 biological experiments pitting man against chimpanzee. Though these athletic contests were unconventional, even by the standards of the day, they served as arenas for predominately white men to display their masculinity. The article thus builds on previous gender and sporting histories, which have viewed physical activity as a means for men to establish their dominance over women and other men during this period. Expanding on this, the article demonstrates the role of nonhumans in this gender sculpting process in the hope of bringing animals even closer to the mainstream.

Acknowledgements

This work was generously funded by the Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship and a Universities’ Ireland History Bursary. The author is indebted to the generosity of David Chapman, who kindly shared images and, more importantly, ideas related to the topic. David’s help brought a greater context to the events discussed above and his seemingly encyclopaedic knowledge on all matters relating to physical culture undoubtedly bolstered the arguments given. Finally, the author would like to extend his gratitude to the anonymous peer-reviewers whose insightful comments helped contextualise and strengthen the article’s arguments. Their advice and encouragement was greatly appreciated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. David P. Willoughby, The Super-Athletes (London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1970), 488.

2. Victor Mather, ‘Michael Phelps “Raced a Shark”, Kind of. Not Really’, New York Times, July 24, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/sports/shark-week-michael-phelps.html (accessed November 1, 2017), Michael S. Rosenwald, ‘The Phelps vs. Shark Charade was Another Bizarre Episode of Humans Racing Animals’, The Washington Post, July 23, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/07/23/michael-phelps-vs-a-shark-the-bizarre-history-of-humans-racing-animals/ (accessed October 15, 2017).

3. As was pointed out to the author by David Chapman, such events were not unique to American modes of entertainment. The Greek strongman Panagis Koutalianos supposedly wrestled tigers. Other instances from Europe during this time can be found in Willoughby, The Super-Athletes, 488–502.

4. Andrea L. Smalley, Wild by Nature: North American Animals Confront Colonization (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 6–8.

5. Harriet Ritvo, ‘Animal Planet’, Environmental History 9, no. 2 (2004): 205.

6. Ewa Domańska, ‘The Historical Animal’. Edited by Susan Nance. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015), ix, 405’; History and Theory 56, no. 2 (2017): 267–8.

7. Hilda Kean, ‘Challenges for Historians Writing Animal–Human History: What Is Really Enough?’, Anthrozoös 25, no. 1 (2012): 57–72.

8. Susan Nance, ‘Introduction’, in The Historical Animal, ed. Susan Nance (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015), 11.

9. Anita Guerrini, ‘Deep History, Evolutionary History, and Animals in the Anthropocene’, in Animal Ethics in the Age of Humans, eds B. Bovenkerk and F.W.J. Keulartz (New York: Springer, 2016), 27–8.

10. Etienne Benson, ‘The Urbanization of the Eastern Gray Squirrel in the United States’, Journal of American History 100, no. 3 (2013): 691–710.

11. Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

12. Pekka Hämäläinen, ‘The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures’, The Journal of American History 90, no. 3 (2003): 833–62.

13. Aaron Herald Skabelund, Empire of Dogs: Canines, Japan, and the Making of the Modern Imperial World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 12.

14. Richard Grove, ‘Early Themes in African Conservation: The Cape in the Nineteenth Century’, in Conservation in Africa: Peoples, Policies and Practice, eds David Anderson and Richard H. Grove (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 21–40; Marge DeMello, Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2012), 84–99 and 146–69; Frederick L. Brown, The City is More Than Human: An Animal History of Seattle (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2016), 4–16.

15. For interested parties, an excellent collection of essays can be found in the following collection: Dorothee Brantz, ed., Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2010).

16. In particular the article refers to the collection of essays Sport, Animals, and Society, eds James Gillett and Michelle Gilbert (London: Routledge, 2013).

17. James Williams, ‘The Cambridge Companion to Horseracing’, Sport in History 34, no. 2 (2014): 378–82; Jeremy Crump, ‘Horseracing and Liberal Governance in Nineteenth Century Leicester’, Sport in History 36, no. 2 (2016): 190–213; Alison Goodrum, ‘The Style Stakes: Fashion, Sportswear and Horse Racing in Inter-war America’, Sport in History 35, no. 1 (2015): 46–80; Wray Vamplew, The Turf: A Social and Economic History of Horse Racing (London: Allen Lane, 1976); Mike Huggins, Horseracing and the British 1919–39 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

18. Erica Munkwitz, ‘The Master is the Mistress: Women and Fox Hunting as Sports Coaching in Britain’, Sport in History 37, no. 4 (2017): 412.

19. See also Erica Munkwitz, ‘Vixens of Venery: Women, Sport, and Fox-Hunting in Britain, 1860–1914’, Critical Survey 24, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 74–87.

20. Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 5–20; Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (London: Routledge, 2014), 79–102; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 6–12; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 10–74; Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 1–20; Harvey Green, Fit for America (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 130–45.

21. R. Connell. “An Iron Man: The Body and Some Contradictions of Hegemonic Masculinity,” in Sport, Men and the Gender Order, ed. M. Messner and D. Sabo (Champaign: Human Kinetics Books, 1990), 141–9.

22. Michael Ramirez, ‘“My Dog’s Just Like Me”: Dog Ownership as a Gender Display’, Symbolic Interaction 29, no. 3 (2006): 373–91; L. Birke and K. Brandt, ‘Mutual Corporeality: Gender and Human/Horse Relationships’, Women’s Studies International Forum 32, no. 3 (2009, June): 189–97; Rosemary-Claire Collard, ‘Cougar Figures, Gender, and the Performances of Predation’, Gender, Place & Culture 19, no. 4 (2012): 518–40. Harold A. Herzog, ‘Gender Differences in Human–Animal Interactions: A Review’, Anthrozoös 20, no. 1 (2007): 7–21.

23. Paul Waldau, Animal Studies: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 26.

24. In terms of horse racing, Huggins’s previous scholarship not only neatly surveys the work to date but provides several of its own fascinating insights. See Mike Huggins, Horseracing and the British 1919–39 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). For a somewhat dated but nevertheless engaged history of hunting see Edward I. Steinhart, ‘Hunters, Poachers and Gamekeepers: Towards a Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya’, The Journal of African History 30, no. 2 (1989): 247–64.

25. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (New York: Dover Thrift, 1912).

26. This is covered well in John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (London: Macmillan, 2001).

27. This idea was not unique to Tarzan. Dave Kuhne, African Settings in Contemporary American Novels (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999), 83.

28. See endnote 15. Additional readings of interest are Karen Manners Smith, ‘New Paths to Power, 1890–1920’, in No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States, ed. Nancy Cott (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 374–412; William H. Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986) and Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1955 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

29. Michael Kimmel, ‘The Contemporary “Crisis” of Masculinity in Historical Perspective’, in The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies, ed. Harry Brod (Boston, MA: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 138.

30. Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America, 1900–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 9–10.

31. Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 117–40; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

32. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 85–100.

33. Ibid., 43 and 120.

34. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4.

35. D.S. Churchill, ‘Making Broad Shoulders: Body-Building and Physical Culture in Chicago 1890 1920’, History of Education Quarterly 48, no. 3 (2008): 341–70.

36. Canonical texts being Bederman, Manliness and Civilization; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 6.

37. Carolyn Thomas De La Peña, The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (New York: NYU Press, 2003), 6–28. For a slightly later period, but still one relevant to the article’s focus see Jacqueline Reich, ‘The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man: Charles Atlas, Physical Culture, and the Inscription of American Masculinity’, Men and Masculinities 12, no. 4 (2010): 444–61.

38. Laurence Goldstein, The Male Body: Features, Destinies, Exposures (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 37–8.

39. M. Kimmel, ‘Baseball and the Reconstitution of American Masculinity, 1880–1920’, in Sport, Men and the Gender Order: Critical Feminist Perspectives, eds M. Messner and D. Sabo (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics Books,1990), 55.

40. Putney, Muscular Christianity, 47.

41. Vertinsky and Hargreaves defined physical culture as ‘those activities where the body itself – its anatomy, its physicality, and more importantly its forms of movement – is the very purpose, the raison d'etre, of the activity’. Jennifer Hargreaves and Patricia Vertinsky, ‘Introduction’, in Physical Culture, Power, and the Body, eds P. Vertinsky and J. Hargreaves (London: Routledge, 2006), 1.

42. Guterl, The Color of Race, 177; John D. Fair, Muscletown USA: Bob Hoffman and the Manly Culture of York Barbell (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1999), 18–24.

43. So embedded had this slogan become within the Macfadden mystique that one historian titled his biography of Macfadden the same. Robert Ernst, Weakness is a Crime: The Life of Bernarr Macfadden (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991).

44. Eugen Sandow, ‘Physical Culture: What is it?’, Physical Culture 1, no. 1 (1898): 2–7.

45. Dudley Allen Sargent, The Sargent Anthropometric Charts: Descriptive Circular (Boston, MA: D.A. Sargent, 1893), 1–4.

46. Arnaldo Testi, ‘The Gender of Reform Politics: Theodore Roosevelt and the Culture of Masculinity’, The Journal of American History 81, no. 4 (1995): 1509–33.

47. John F. Kassan, Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 19.

48. Ibid., 24.

49. David Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent: Sandow the Magnificent: Eugen Sandow and the Beginnings of Bodybuilding (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois , 2006), 80–95; David Waller, The Perfect Man: The Muscular Life and Times of Eugen Sandow, Victorian Strongman (London: Victorian Secrets, 2011), 77–91.

50. Ethan Mordden, Broadway Babies: The People Who Made the American Musical (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 35.

51. Kassan, Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man, 46–9. See also ‘Sandow Examined’, San Francisco Examiner, May 6, 1894, 4.

52. This too influenced gender identities in colonial states. See Mrinalini Sinha’, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 2–2; Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (London: Psychology Press, 1977), 4–12; Shula Marks and Anthony Atmore, ‘Firearms in South Africa: A Survey’, The Journal of African History 12, no. 4 (1971): 517–30.

53. Michael Anton Budd, The Sculpture Machine (London: Palgrave, 1997), 34–44.

54. Malinda Alaine Lindquist, Race, Social Science and the Crisis of Manhood, 1890–1970: We are the Supermen (London: Routledge, 2012), 1–22.

55. Eugen Sandow, The Gospel of Strength According to Sandow: A Series of Talks on the Sandow System of Physical Culture, by its Founder (Melbourne: T. Shaw Fitchett, 1902), introduction; Eugen Sandow, How I conduct Curative Physical Culture by Correspondence (London: The Sandow Institute, 1910), 4; Eugen Sandow, The Power of Evidence: Being a Series of Reports from Many Hundreds of a similar Nature of Patients Treated Through the Post and at the Institute during a period of Twelve Months by The Sandow Institute of Curative Illness without Medicine (London: Sandow’s Curative Institute 1919), 1.

56. Kassan, Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man, 46–49.

57. Ethan Mordden, Ziegfeld: The Man Who Invented Show Business (London: Macmillan, 2008), 27–9.

58. Janet M. Davis, The Gospel of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 60–88.

59. Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent, 155; Waller, The Perfect Man, 52.

60. One advertising campaign even featured Sandow pressing a horse overhead. See Conor Heffernan, ‘The Strength Peddlers: Eddie O’Callaghan and the Selling of Irish Strength’, Sport in History 38, no. 1 (2018): 23–45.

61. Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent, 68.

62. Ibid., 29.

63. This is covered particularly well by Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent, 85–8.

64. ‘For the Love of Art’, The Morning Call, May 20, 1894, 3.

65. On the first point see Pratik Chakrabarti, Medicine and Empire: 1600–1960 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

66. Jacob Smith, The Thrill Makers: Celebrity, Masculinity, and Stunt Performance (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 96–100.

67. Health and Strength, March 1902, cover page. Author is indebted once more to David Chapman on this point.

68. ‘She Controls Lions by Kindness’, Chicago Daily Tribune, November 3, 1901, 48; ‘Why It Is Harder to Tame a Husband Than a Lion’, Chicago Daily Tribune, April 1, 1906, 4.

69. Smith, The Thrill Makers, 97–8.

70. A recent work on the gender undertones of this point being Carol Dyhouse, Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 83–4.

71. ‘A Picnic for the Perfect Man’, Los Angeles Herald, May 23, 1894, 3.

72. ‘Man Versus Lion’, The Morning Call, May 23, 1894, 3.

73. A final example being ‘No Fight in Him’, The Salt Lake Herald, May 24, 1894, 1.

74. Eugen Sandow, Strength and How to Obtain It (London: Gale & Polden, 1897), 137–8.

75. Paul Gillen and Devleena Ghosh, Colonialism & Modernity (Montgomery, NSW: University of New South Wales Press, 2007), 92–111.

76. Janet M. Davis, The Circus Age: Culture & Society under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 1–15; S.L. Kotar and J.E. Gessler, The Rise of the American Circus, 1716–1899 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 318–21.

77. One example being John Springhall, The Genesis of Mass Culture: Show Business Live in America, 1840 to 1940 (London: Springer, 2008), 151–70.

78. Davis, The Circus Age, 1–15.

79. A definitive biography on Barnum being Philip B. Kunhardt and Peter W. Kunhardt, PT Barnum: America’s Greatest Showman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Incorporated, 1995).

80. Sandow’s lion fight was still being discussed nearly a decade later in Honolulu. ‘Sandow the Strong Man Sees Honolulu’s Sights’, The Pacific, February 4, 1903, 1.

81. Michael Egan, ‘Wrestling Teddy Bears – Wilderness Masculinity as Invented Tradition in the Pacific Northwest’, Gender Forum 15 (2006): 32–49.

82. Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 440–2.

83. Wilber W. Caldwell, American Narcissism: The Myth of National Superiority (New York: Algora Publishing, 2006), 108–10.

84. ‘Pierce Versus Fatima’, Aberdeen Democrat, July 13, 1906, 7.

85. Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 36.

86. Wendy L. Rouse, Her Own Hero: The Origins of the Women’s Self-Defense Movement (New York: NYU Press, 2017), 9–38.

87. Alice M Shukalo, ‘Communing with the Gods: Bodybuilding, Masculinity and US Imperialism, 1875–1900’ (PhD Dissertation, University of Texas, 2005).

88. ‘Bear Wrestling Match Proves Good Card’, The Evening Herald, October 10, 1913, 6.

89. ‘Stays Limits with Bear’, The Bemidji Daily Pioneer, January 28, 1911, 1; ‘The Wrestling Bear John Brown’, The Copper Era, December 5, 1913, 5; ‘Bear Got His Goat’, The Gazette Times, June 17, 1915, 1; ‘Wrestling Bear’, The Ogden Standard, November 5, 1915, 3.

90. ‘Woman to Rassle with Bear’, The Times of Northwest Indiana, April 22, 1910, 3.

91. ‘Bear Got His Goat’, The Gazette Times, June 17, 1915, 1.

92. Susan Nance, Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 119 and 182 in particular.

93. Kari Weil, ‘Men and Horses: Circus Studs, Sporting males and the Performance of Purity in Fin-de-Siëcle France’, French Cultural Studies 17, no. 1 (2006): 87–105.

94. ‘Strangler Lewis’, Tulsa Daily World, April 23, 1922, 10.

95. John E. Bauman, ‘The Strength of the Chimpanzee and Orang’, The Scientific Monthly 16, no. 4 (1923): 432.

96. Incidentally the machine may appear to modern gym goers as a rather crudely designed seated row machine.

97. Glen Finch, ‘The Bodily Strength of Chimpanzees’, Journal of Mammalogy 24, no. 2 (1943): 224–8.

98. Ibid.

99. Ibid.

100. John E. Bauman, ‘Observations on the Strength of the Chimpanzee and Its Implications’, Journal of Mammalogy 7, no. 1 (1926): 2–3.

101. Ibid., 4.

102. Kimmel, ‘Baseball and the Reconstitution of American Masculinity, 1880–1920’, 55. See also Steven Riess, ‘Sport and the Redefinition of American Middle-Class Masculinity’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 8, no. 1 (1991): 5–27.

103. This is brought out particularly well in Chris Gibson, ‘The Global Cowboy: Rural Masculinities and Sexualities’, in Sexuality, Rurality, and Geography, eds Andrew Gorman-Murray, Barbara Pini and Lia Bryant (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), 199–205.

104. Bauman, ‘Observations on the Strength of the Chimpanzee and Its Implications’, 6.

105. Ibid., 6–7.

106. ‘Science Proves Apes Amazingly Stronger Than Man’, The Ogden Standard Examiner, August 26, 1923, 5. See also ‘Science Proves Apes Amazingly Stronger Than Man’, The Philadelphia Enquirer Section, August 26, 1923, 9.

107. ‘Chimpanzee is Four Times as Strong as Man’, Oakland Tribune, March 12, 1926, 11.

108. ‘Measures Strength of Apes’, The Berkeley Daily Gazette, July 5, 1926, 4.

109. Ewa Barbara Luczak, Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination: Heredity Rules in the Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 161–80.

110. See for example Alfred Brazier Howell, Anatomy of the Wood Rat: Comparative Anatomy of the Subgenera of the American Wood Rat (genus Neotoma). No. 1. (Philadelphia: The Williams & Wilkins Company, 1926), 175; Daniel Summer Robinson, Illustrations of the Methods of Reasoning: A Source Book in Logic and Scientific Method (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1931), 132–3; Adolph Hans Schultz, Studies on the Growth of Gorilla and of Other Higher Primates: with Special Reference to a Fetus of Gorilla, Preserved in the Carnegie Museum. Vol. 11. (New York: Carnegie Institute, 1927), 18 & 68; William E. Edwards, Study of Monkey and Ape and Human Morphology and Physiology Relating to Strength and Endurance. Phase 3I: The Resting of Chimpanzee Strength Prior to 1961 (District of Columbia: William E. Edwards, 1963), 6–8.

111. Jonathan Burt, ‘The Illumination of the Animal Kingdom: The Role of Light and Electricity in Animal Representation’, Society & Animals 9, no. 3 (2001): 203–4.

112. Again we return to Nance, Entertaining Elephants, which highlighted both the compliance and resistance evident within the circus elephant’s agency.

113. ‘Bear Got His Goat’, The Gazette Times, June 17, 1915, 1.

114. Many of which are found in Dorothee Brantz, ed., Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History (Charlottesville VA: University of Virginia Press, 2010). See also Phil McManus and Daniel Montoya, ‘Toward New Understandings of Human–Animal Relationships in Sport: A Study of Australian Jumps Racing’, Social & Cultural Geography 13, no. 4 (2012): 399–420.

115. Dominique Padurano, ‘Making American Men: Charles Atlas and the Business of Bodies, 1892–1945’ (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 2007), 6–20.

116. The MMA fighter Conor McGregor’s comments that he studies and emulates the movement of animals as part of hi training regimen suggests that this line of enquiry still holds relevance. Marc Ramondi, ‘Conor McGregor Knows You’re Laughing at his Movement Drills, But “It Paid off” For Him’, MMA Fighting, December 14, 2015, https://www.mmafighting.com/2015/12/14/10021992/conor-mcgregor-knows-youre-laughing-at-his-movement-drills-but-it (accessed November 24, 2017).

117. Such studies have already begun in fact. See Kevin Young and Brittany Gerber, ‘Sporting Identities of Human and Animal Athletes’, in Sport, Animals, and Society, eds James Gillett and Michelle Gilbert (London: Routledge, 2014), 218–24. The authors draw upon the existing literature on mascots, and Native American mascots, in particular to explore the significance of animal mascots within the American zeitgeist.

118. Fans of the sport will recall the sensation Roberts caused when he brought his ‘pet’ python Damien to the ring for the first time. Brian Shields, Main Event: WWE in the Raging 80s (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 94–6.

Additional information

Funding

This work was generously funded by the Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship and a Universities’ Ireland History Bursary.