Elephant execution in the United States

[1][2] During this era, elephant behavior was often explained anthropomorphically, and thus granted a moral dimension wherein their actions were "good" or "bad.

[4] The consequences of this ignorance were reliably disastrous: for example, in Mississippi in March 1869 during a phase now recognized as musth, a bull elephant named Hercules became enraged, broke his chains, charged a freight train, and succeeded in derailing the locomotive (at the expense of one of his tusks).

The locomotive then crashed into the lion cage, killing the female and releasing the male.

)[5] In the mind of the animal trainer or carnival owner of the era, a bull elephant was "an unruly brute…who required frequent punishment, without which he would become completely uncontrollable and destroy what showmen built.

[8] There was a clear-cut parallel between elephant executions and the lynching of minorities, which was both recognized at the time and remains a subject of scholarship.