Postcard of the Day No. 95 - Animals on Board

Today’s card offers the arresting site of an elephant in a sling, hanging in space as it’s manoeuvred on or off a cargo ship. A desperately uncomfortable position in which to find such an imperious and dignified creature. The location is a port in Colonial Burma where the British authorities had many uses for elephants as a source of cheap, and uncomplaining labour. They were especially valued on timber plantations where they could be put to work hauling enormous loads of logs out of the forests for processing. Elephant traders got rich by capturing the creatures in the wild and selling them on to commercial interests for whom they were a prized asset. Elephants didn’t join trade unions or support campaigns for independence from the colonial masters. On the second card, a rudimentary steam powered crane is hauling an ox carcass on to the quayside in the port of Casablanca where it is about to be unceremoniously dumped. These are discomforting images and worrisome examples of indifference to animal suffering.

Animal Intelligence

There’s much speculation around about the rise of artificial intelligence and its potential to eclipse the human variety. But we could be looking in the wrong direction if these images are anything to go by. It would be much more alarming if animal intelligence were to make a sudden evolutionary leap, leaving humanity far behind. Perhaps the best we could look forward to is domestication in the service of a new breed of super-dogs, at whose feet we may be permitted to lie for as long as we are able to maintain the necessary level of servile ingratiation. These illustrations for children from a book titled Clever Animals, offer sentimentality and cruelty in equal measure as the subjects are forced into demeaning costumes or made to perform ridiculous tasks. Despite which they contain the occasional sly touch of incongruity inserted by the artist, intentionally or otherwise.

The Room in the Elephant

There’s a long tradition of eccentric architectural forms, often inspired by the desire to symbolise spiritual or religious beliefs. The Colossal Elephant of Coney Island has more temporal origins being inspired by the need to maximise returns on sums invested. As the Scientific American dated July 11, 1885 expressed it the purpose was “to abstract the unwary dime from the inquisitive sight-seer”. Designed to function as a hotel by architect J Mason Kirby for the developer James V Lafferty, it was constructed in timber clad with sheets of tinplate in 1885, a decade before the railroad arrived and two decades before Luna Park and Dreamland amusement parks set the tone for future development. When complete the Elephant had seven floors of accommodation and a suite of 34 rooms some of which took their names from the creature’s bodily functions. There was a stomach room, thigh room, hip room and brain room – in the interests of public decency the more basic organs went uncelebrated. Surmounting the creature was a howdah that served as an observation platform with spectacular views. Accounts of the actual operation of the hotel are hard to find and it would be interesting to know whether its unusual form rendered it impractical as a working hotel. It seems that decline was early and rapid – some sources claim it became a house of ill-repute, others that it stood vacant for several years before being destroyed by fire in September 1896. Lafferty developed two other less ambitious seaside pachydermal pavilions, one of which, named Lucy, is still in existence in Margate, New Jersey.