Abstract
Abstract: In early-nineteenth-century America and Britain, authors crafted sensational, emotional, and widely popular narratives around the so-called murders of several show elephants. Using these narratives this article explores the interconnected development of Anglo-American understandings of elephants and animals, the usage of the term murder , moral codes about animal killing, and the relationships between these moral codes and laws and national identity. It applies approaches from animal studies, literary studies, anthropology, and the histories of law, empire, emotion, morality, and nationalism. Writers that focused on elephants as more human-like than other nonhuman animals, on elephant killers as moral deviants, and on elephants as sympathetic figures, encouraged Americans, and to a lesser extent Britons, to see other violence and killing in imperial and national expansion as morally acceptable. Writers normalized a distinction between so-called rational killing for food, economics, or settler colonialism that should not generate sympathy, and elephant killings that should be mourned to prove national sensibility and morality. Because the law seemed inadequate to respond to elephant killings, authors also argued that the people must create justice through their own emotional responses. The article provides an example for tracking how people focused attention on otherwise low-stakes moral transgressions to develop belief in their collective national virtue.