Chunee
William Moffat, which will be exhibited at Rumsey [sic] fair on Monday; and it is expected he will be offered for public inspection for a day or two, in this town [Winchester], on his way to the Exeter 'Change London.Chunee arrived in 1811 (some sources mistakenly state 1810) and was originally exhibited at the Covent Garden Theatre,[1]: 190 but was bought by Polito (along with a two-headed cow, kangaroos, beavers, and exotic birds) from the estate of Gilbert Pidcock of the Exeter Exchange after Pidcock's death in 1810.
This huge mountain of flesh consumes daily three trusses of hay, and about two hundred weight of carrots and other fresh vegetables, together with from sixty to eighty gallons of water".
[3] Tame for most of his life but not as docile as it was sometimes claimed, Chunee was originally a theatrical animal, appearing onstage with famed thespian Edmund Kean.
He was relocated to the Exeter Exchange and learned tricks including being trained to take a sixpence from visitors to the menagerie to hold with his trunk before returning it.
An entry in Lord Byron's journal records a visit to Exeter Exchange on 14 November 1813, when "The elephant took and gave me my money again—took off my hat—opened a door—trunked a whip—and behaved so well, that I wish he was [sic] my butler.
[6] By 1820, Chunee had more than doubled in size since his arrival in England, requiring new quarters -- an "upstairs cage, made of iron-bound oak bars, three feet in girth" -- which cost Cross £350.
It was considered that if this treatment worked at all it was only because "the peristaltics of the bowels continuously operating at maximum velocity might well have had a fatiguing influence even on an ungovernable elephant".
[6] His frustrated libido and matelessness were aggravated by relatively cramped quarters in which he lived in forcible seclusion as there was no way of conveying him, due to his size and weight, in and out of the exchange building.
No ship captain would agree, however, to take aboard such a huge creature on the long voyage even if Chunee could have been somehow transported from his quarters.
[5] By February 1826, permanently enraged, the elephant's "eyes now glared like lenses of glass reflecting a red and burning light", according to one account.
Three days later (Wednesday, 1 March), his keepers tried in different ways to feed him food which had been laced with poison but Chunee refused each time to eat it.
"[9] Hundreds of people paid the usual shilling entrance fee to see his carcass butchered, and then dissected by doctors and medical students from the Royal College of Surgeons.
[10] His skeleton weighed 876 lb (397 kg), and was sold for £100 and exhibited at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, and later at the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln's Inn Fields, the bullet holes clearly visible.
Letters were printed in The Times protesting the circumstances of Chunee's death and the alleged poor quality of the living conditions of the animals in the menagerie.
The controversy was the inspiration for a successful play at Sadler's Wells, entitled Chuneelah; or, The Death of the Elephant at Exeter 'Change, which ran for around six months.
