Murder, Death, and Suicide at the Zoo: Revisiting Anthropomorphic Stories of Quebec’s Captive Polar Bears, 1936–58

Abstract

Between the 1930s and 1950s, two cohorts of polar bears became star attractions at the Jardin zoologique du Québec, located in Charlesbourg on the outskirts of Quebec City. There, polar bear narratives changed because behaviours and expectations of the zoo’s public changed. But these stories were also shaped by the behaviours of these bears over their lifetimes. By using critical anthropomorphism as a method and drawing on studies of bears in zoos and in the wild, this article suggests that these bears’ moods, emotions, and behaviours were influenced by their individual personalities, the nature of their enclosures, the new stimuli introduced to them, their conditioning to zoo visitors and keepers, and their aging. Stories of the bears, in turn, likely shaped the bears’ human perception. Reproduced in newspaper coverage, much of it carried in wire services, these stories reached very large audiences. The way in which bear behaviours were interpreted, misinterpreted, and anthropomorphized suggests how the animals gained public interest as southern Canadian urban populations oriented themselves toward the Arctic as a “second frontier” in the interwar period, particularly during the Depression years of the 1930s.