Zoophagy

New York City,
1905

Zoophagy is an obscure word meaning the eating of animals. These days we mostly use “carnivore” to describe flesh-eaters, and it usually does the trick. However, zoophagy seems better suited to some situations, such as the dinner held in New York in 1905 featuring a Bornean Rhinoceros from the Berlin Zoo.

Fillets of the odd-toed ungulate were served at a banquet held by the Canadian Camp, a club of sportsmen, naturalists, and explorers whose members believed that it was their duty to “be the game”—in other words, to eat the animals they killed. This often meant ingesting some strange new species at their dinners. In the case of the rhinoceros, its carcass arrived in Manhattan as a gift from Prince Henry of Prussia who must have learned something about the club and its philosophy during his visit to the United States in 1902, as an emissary of his older brother, the German Emperor. Four strong waiters carried the hindquarters of the beast on a wooden slab around the fashionable ballroom of the new Hotel Astor on Times Square before taking it away to be carved.

Although the roast rhino took center stage that night, there were a number of other unusual game dishes at the banquet. The menu below includes a puree of Indiana raccoon, a stew of musquash (muskrat) trapped in Ontario, and mephitis (skunk) pie, a dish that reportedly caused some of the many ladies at the dinner to feel squeamish until they discovered that it “tasted very much like lamb,” according to the New York Sun. After the skunk pie came the sorbet, the palate cleanser being well positioned in the sequence of dishes, followed by wild turkey from fellow-member Dan Beard’s “swamp” in Kentucky. The banquet concludes with Nimrod salad, named after a mighty hunter in the Bible; Hamlin Garland cakes, a reference to the American novelist whose naturalistic style matched the mid-western frontier life he portrayed; and menagerie ice cream.

With only a few remaining in the jungles of Sumatra, Borneo, and the Malay Peninsula, the Bornean Rhinoceros (also known as the Sumatran Rhinoceros) is now on the critically endangered list, the highest risk category assigned by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. Although the decline of the species is primarily attributed to poaching for horns highly valued in traditional Chinese medicine, there is another problem that can develop once a species is placed on the endangered list. Ironically, inclusion on the list often has the opposite effect of that intended, making the animal more desirable as banquet fare. Evidence of this can be seen in the Chinese province of Guangdong, where rare species are served as a sign of wealth and rank. Although the Bornean is the smallest of the five extant rhinoceroses, ranging anywhere from 1,100 to 1,800 pounds, these solitary animals are probably too large to suffer from this additional assault on their existence. Nevertheless, the very idea of it raises questions about the etymology of the situation, for words are among the few weapons that we have to save such creatures. Maybe the word “zoophagy” has been excluded from general use for too long; perhaps we should appropriate it to describe zoophagous behavior regarding endangered species.