Bonzo's War (12 page)

Rabbits were going to have an interesting war. Wild, Mr McGregor-taunting, crop-munching country rabbits were the nation's enemy. Farmers could blast, gas and trap away as they pleased. Tame, fat city rabbits being fed on cabbage leaves in backyard hutches, however, might be the nation's salvation. How else could one obtain 2½lbs of meat for feeding costs of no more than 6
d
?

Three does would produce an average of sixty youngsters in a year, readers of
Fur and Feather
were informed, but it would be better to have four. The mating
must be spaced out, lest all the litters arrived at the same time. Some householders found that tenancy agreements forbade them to keep rabbits, but in the emergency of mid-summer 1940 all restrictions would be lifted by the Government. Soon there would be rabbits everywhere.

On 1 November a brave new magazine appeared:
Goats
, edited by Mr W. O'Connell Holmes of ‘Capricorn', Polstead, Suffolk. ‘Each and every goat dairy in the country is now a vital stronghold in the defence of the Home Front,' he declared stirringly. Under the heading ‘ARP for Goats', he advised: ‘To prevent panic in the goat house from the sound of bombs, give your goats, especially the highly-strung milkers, a sedative medicine.' His journal would prosper.

The Pigeon Fancy was having an altogether tougher time as the Government wanted message-carrying birds for its own purposes. Strict wartime regulations aimed to both control birds in private ownership (lest they bear treacherous messages out of the country) and to clear the skies for official pigeons.

It became an offence for anyone to keep pigeons without a permit, to free pigeons, or to kill or wound any racers or homers. Anyone finding a pigeon, alive or dead, with an identification mark or a message attached, was to hand it over at once to a policeman, making no attempt to read or decode the message. Farmers and sportsmen were urged to take special care not to shoot long-distance pigeons – you never knew what they might be carrying.

Bee keeping was also very patriotic. Bees might have a role beyond the production of honey, too. An article in
PDSA News
would suggest:

Bees as messengers – bearing tiny rolls of paper they would be better than pigeons and their drone more
reliable. Coloured by powder according to a prearranged signal, they could carry urgent information safely, and speedily.

The War Office, sadly, was not interested in the proposal.

Britain had gone to war for the sake of Poland. That country was now long beyond help. The animals of Warsaw Zoo had been bombed on 25 September 1939, two days before the city's surrender, the first of many European menageries to be smashed to pieces. The seals escaped into the River Vistula, ostriches and anteaters roamed the Old Town. Cristina Zabinski, the director's wife, kept a diary. ‘Submerged in their wallows, the hippos, otters and beavers survived,' she wrote. ‘Somehow the bears, bison, Przewalksi horses, camels, zebras and reptiles survived.'

Pretty soon a visitor arrived. Lutz Heck, the director of Berlin Zoo, smiling and persuasive just as he had been as a colleague and collaborator in the pre-war days, engaged in his strange quest to recreate the beasts of Neolithic Europe by selective breeding. He had joined the Nazi Party in 1938 and found high-level backing for his plan to populate the primeval Białowieża Forest in eastern Poland with eugenically recreated ancient aurochs cattle and tarpan horses.

Warsaw Zoo's survivors, including the baby orphan elephant ‘Tusinka' (whose mother had been killed in the air raid), were smartly carried off in special trains to Germany.

Heck's career had been extraordinary. The most significant zoologist in the world in the decade before the war, to mark the 1936 Berlin Olympics he opened a ‘German Zoo' – an exhibit honouring the country's wildlife, complete with ‘Wolf Rock' at its centre (an enduring feature of Teutonic animal parks). But now Herr Heck had concerns closer to home. His autobiography recorded the summer of 1939 as war approached and Nazi officials, like those in London, became concerned with what to do should any of Berlin Zoo's 4,000 animals escape in an air raid. Lions and tigers would seek shelter rather than attack humans, so Herr Heck pleaded, and snakes (except the African mamba) would be numb and sluggish without artificial heat.

A ‘frightened elephant' however was very unpredictable. The most dangerous animal in fact was the German stag (in the rutting season). Nazis and pets presented a paradox. Where, in a political system erected on racist biological abstraction, did pets figure?

They were seemingly at the heart of things. Germans loved their pets as much as anyone else; it was other people they were not so sure about. The Third Reich's strict animal protection laws, enacted in November 1933, had taken welfare of all animals – domestic, wild and commercial – into a new dimension. But pets were highly politicized. And they were culturally ambiguous. Pets were bourgeois. Pets were tame. Some dogs might be honorary wolves but cats seemed wilfully disinclined to obey orders.

The welfare laws themselves were also politicized, underpinning the anti-Semitic goals of the regime in expressing ‘healthy German popular sentiment' against kosher slaughter and animal experiments performed by ‘Jewish' science. These laws also banned fox hunting by what was left of Germany's toffs.

The Reichstierschutzbund (the Reich SPCA, for want of a better description) absorbed local animal societies run on cosy British lines with little apparent fuss. Its headquarters were in Frankfurt-am-Main, with the city's Nazi mayor, Friedrich Krebs, as its ‘leader'. From 1938 membership was restricted to those of ‘German or related blood'.

Detailed ‘welfare' laws continued to be decreed almost until the very end of the Third Reich, concerning such matters as the ‘humane' killing of lobsters, or how to transport a dog on a railway train. The irony of such Nazi concern for animals, when human life was held in murderous contempt, has often been remarked upon.

Dogs however had a special place in the national socialist state. Boxers, German Shepherds and certain other breeds were militarily useful. When the German Army went to war in 1939 it already had thousands of ‘skilfully trained sheepdogs', so it was reported in London. In December it was decreed that dogs measuring more than 50 cm to the shoulder should be registered for potential war service with allotted rations of offal and oatmeal. But they would have to pass rigorous tests to get it.
¹⁰

For less warlike animals, ‘special ration cards will henceforth be issued for dogs of exceptional pedigree, sporting dogs and dogs of the blind,' so British newspaper readers were told, ‘which will entitle them to an allowance of oat or barley meal. The rest are to be destroyed to conserve food supplies.' This in fact was a propaganda lie. ‘Cats are exempt from destruction as they keep down rats and mice.'

In
Animal and Zoo Magazine
the writer Carl Olsson recalled the stirring events of the blockade starvation winter of 1917–18, ‘when ordinary Germans who had always loved their zoo and their academic leaders who had made them into the finest institutions of their kind in the world, protested at attempts to cull the animals – and thousands were saved to see the Armistice.' Not this time. The ferocious beasts of Berlin were doomed, although Hermann Göring had rescued some lion cubs for his hunting estate. And this was not just propaganda about Nazi frightfulness. Lutz Heck's post-war autobiography described air raid precautions and gas drills in September 1939 as he toured the garden with his Wire Haired Fox Terrier ‘Lutting'.

‘Orders were given for all beasts of prey to be shot,' he wrote. Very soon all the lions, tigers, leopards and bears were killed.

It was further reported in London that the ‘Reich Minister of Agriculture had ordered all elephants, yaks, camels and oxen that might serve as draught animals to be registered' and sent to a special school near Munich, where ‘circus trainers would break them in for war work.'
Hamburg Zoo and Hagenbeck's travelling menagerie were doing the same. Elephants were pulling ploughs in Hanover and hauling lumber in the Black Forest. Hamburg Zoo's lions, tigers and all carnivores had been shot out of hand, so British animal lovers were informed. ‘The fish eaters, seals, walruses and sea lions, pride of Berlin Zoo, have all been destroyed, their blubber utilised and their meat put on the menus of Berlin restaurants. All reptiles have been destroyed.'

Dresden Zoo's lions, tigers and panthers had all gone the same way. All the snakes had perished except the boas and pythons, one of whom was fed an entire goat just before the outbreak of war. Munich Zoo had managed to evade the killing order, apart from ‘a few of the bigger chimpanzees'.

The Paris Zoo in the Bois de Vincennes had shut for a week, like Regent's Park, when mothers and children left the French capital. The majority of the animals were evacuated south and west. ‘Some went on loan to travelling circuses, even the fish that went to private aquaria, including the one owned by the Prince of Monaco at Monte Carlo,' so
Animal and Zoo Magazine
reported. ‘Only a few animals were killed, a morose and dangerous orangutan and an obstreperous bull elephant that would not enter his travelling box and had to be shot. Some wolves were shot as being generally unwelcome as guests.'

London Zoo took steps to advertise the fact that it had reopened. Indeed, so it was reported in early October, ‘only a few redundant and elderly animals have been destroyed'. Come back to the zoo, ‘the animals will enjoy your company' was the message – ‘and bring stale bread and buns, Spanish chestnuts and nuts of every kind, the outer leaves of cabbages and lettuces to feed your Zoo favourites.'

Heart-warming stories were back in the newspapers – for example, the one about ‘George' the chimp, who was doing patriotic tasks such as knitting socks for soldiers. Jerboas, chinchillas and echidnas were all said to be enjoying the blackout. The outdoor leopards were, ‘interested in watching the rise and fall of the balloons which are a source of never-ceasing wonder to them'.

On 13 November, ‘Sammy', a runaway black genet on the loose for thirteen months, was found dead in a trap in Romford. The following day, ‘Koko', the Zoo's most famous chimp, died at Regent's Park.

Twin African crested porcupines were the Zoo's first war babies, of which only one had survived. The tiny urchin was in the Small Mammal House, being kept warm by an electric lamp. What would the momentous events engulfing Europe hold for him?

10
  An anonymous Internet memoir tells the story of a twelve-year-old in Linz, who took his German Shepherd, ‘Donar' – described as ‘a pure-bred dog with a first-class pedigree' – for the obligatory assessment. His friend Willi's Saint Bernard, ‘Barry', was there too. They had contrived between them to make sure their pets failed the test so as not to lose them to the military.

‘The day of the dog evaluation came, a beautiful hot summer day. Willi and I went with Barry and Donar to the meadow behind the Bulgariplatz where the dogs were to be evaluated. A man in civilian clothes made a speech. He said we must all be proud that our dogs might fight for our leaders, our people and country. Two soldiers fired their guns simultaneously. At once Barry scurried loose. I kicked Donar hard without them noticing and he yelped and ran. 

‘A couple of days later my parents received a registered letter. It stated that our Donar was found to be unfit for service. Any German Shepherd that is unworthy is not breed-worthy and therefore is not allowed to be used at stud for any German bitch. We were commanded to return the pedigree certificate, to be destroyed by those responsible for the purity of the breed.'

 

 

 

I am sorry, my little cat, I am sorry –

If I had it, you should have it;

But there is a war on.

The butcher has no lights,

The fishmonger has no cod's heads –

There is nothing for you.

‘To Her Cat in Wartime', Dorothy L. Sayers, 1940

There was little that was phoney about the ‘phoney war' for pets. Even if no real land fighting was going on, in the winter of 1939–40 the perils of the blackout, evacuation and an unpredictable diet made the months following Poland's subjection an uncomfortable time for Britain's Home Front animals. It was about to get worse.

On 8 January 1940, bacon, butter and sugar were rationed. Meat would surely be next. It was getting scrappy round the food bowl. The enormous proportion of imported food, especially meat and animal feed that came by ship to the as yet only mildly embattled island, made national survival look perilous. The public were only just waking up to the danger as the ‘Dig for Victory' campaign sought to turn every garden into an allotment and every backyard into a miniature livestock farm. The trouble was, these were pets you were meant to eat.

On the first day of the New Year the National Poultry Council had expressed ‘grave concern at the large quantities of feeding stuffs which are being consumed by hunters, packs of hounds, dogs, pigeons etc, not engaged in war-work'. The whispering about ‘useless mouths' was growing louder.

Corn imports for chickenfeed had already been cut to a trickle. ‘Even dogs are given more consideration than poultry,' an outraged chicken farmer declared at the start of the year – ‘there is no restriction on the manufacture of dog biscuits made from just the ingredients required for egg production.'

Evacuated London children had meanwhile turned from being lovable urchins into nit-ridden horrors. ‘I've seen a dog with better manners,' pronounced a shocked matron in the shires. Displaced townie dogs were being blamed for a wave of sheep worrying as lambing time drew on. Dog lovers generally sniffed a growing anti-canine sentiment. Anyway the New Year was always a bad time to be a British dog: it was when the 7
s
. 6
d
. licence fell due. As Mr Slee of the Dog and Cat Infirmary, Plymouth, told the local paper: ‘It was always found after January 1 that strays became plentiful. Bitch puppies in particular seemed to be unwanted, and were carried in baskets to the city outskirts and turned adrift.'