Lassoing Giraffes and Wrasslin’ Rhinos

In August 1935, the Berlin Zoo lost a beloved gorilla to illness. Everyone was crushed, especially zookeeper Lutz Heck. So Heck sent his wife Eva to Cameroon to find a replacement. Eva eventually found a Greek merchant who owned a four-year-old female gorilla. Her name was Boo-Boo. She stood five and a half feet tall. The merchant kept Boo-Boo chained up by her leg, but she had free reign within the house.

Boo Boo loved opening the refrigerator on hot days, grabbing a beer, ripping the pull tab off, and chugging it down. Quite refreshing. The merchant didn't mind her drinking, but her habit of never shutting the damn fridge door always left him grumbling. Sometimes the merchant would stroll into the nearest village and let Boo Boo off the chain, at which point she would go on a rampage, charging people and bellowing at them. The villagers would scream and scatter, terrified at this psychotic, possibly drunk gorilla. The merchant would laugh and laugh. Zookeeper Lutz Heck recounts this tale in a memoir he wrote called Animals, My Adventure. The story is a perfect microcosm of the book, charming one sentence, horrifying

the next. And while Lutz clearly loved animals, he often seemed oblivious to their pain. The book is also remarkable as a document of how zoos captured game then. Ever wonder how they snagged all those big beasts? Well, they lassoed giraffes and wrestled down rhinos with their bare hands. Some of Lutz Heck's tales were as wild as the Serengeti itself. This is The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean, a topsy-turvy, science-y history podcast where footnotes become the real story.

Lutz Heck and his brother Heinz grew up at the zoo. They were not feral or abandoned or anything. Their father ran the Berlin Zoo and had a cottage on the grounds. So Lutz and Heinz grew up around lions and seals and gorillas. In 1932, Lutz succeeded his father as head of the Berlin Zoo. His new responsibilities included securing big animals.

Lutz took to the task with gusto, traveling all over the world. His most adventurous trip was to Africa in the mid-1930s. In the regions he visited, there were almost no roads. They often had to ride camels or mules. But Heck let nothing stop him. To get giraffes, Heck went wild west on them. He hired some African cowboys to lasso them from horseback. The first challenge was finding suitable horses. Despite all the grasslands there, horses struggle in Africa.

Diseases clobber them. European colonialists tried for years to domesticate zebras to ride instead. And one Lord Rothschild did train a quartet of zebras to pull his coach through London. It was quite a sight. But those were rare zebras. The vast majority are stubborn and skittish. They are hyper-aware of threats, imagined or real, and they will bolt at the slightest provocation. They also have vicious kicks. They can kill lions with one swift blow. So riding zebras would not work. But Lotshek eventually found some hardy horses from South Africa, and he hired two rowdy South Africans to ride them. The South Africans trained for giraffes by lassoing zebras, and the zebras proved surprisingly easy to run down. Again,

zebras bolt at the slightest threat. But to outrun a lion or cheetah, they don't have to run that far, maybe a few hundred yards. Big cats tire quickly and poop out. Horses, in contrast, have been bred to run for miles and miles. They can run zebras down no sweat. After practicing by lassoing zebras, the South African cowboys snagged more animals, elands, news, even ostriches. Imagine lassoing an ostrich around its big gangly neck. After capturing these animals, they stored them in a corral made of wires strung around trees.

That proved a dumb idea. Inevitably, lions spied all those tasty critters and realized that they were confined to a space that they could not escape. So the lions took one big running leap over the fence and commenced to slaughter them. Heck ended up having to shoot the lions. Then his crew sighed and rounded up replacements. To snag giraffes, the cowboys made lassos out of African buffalo hide, the toughest leather around. But even then, the task proved intimidating.

Giraffes can reach 18 feet tall. If the cowboys found themselves riding on opposite sides of one that big, they could actually see each other between the giraffe's legs, under its stomach. The cowboys realized that they could not lasso the tallest giraffes. Instead, they charged into a pack to scatter the giraffes and separate babies from mothers. The babies they targeted were only about nine feet tall. One was so young, it still had its umbilical cord dangling from its belly, which sounds crazy if you've ever been around a human baby. Human babies are utterly helpless, even long after the umbilical cord falls off. But there's no gentle learning curve in the Serengeti. Giraffes plop out of their

mother's wombs, essentially ready to run. Now, even though these baby giraffes were not towering, it's still difficult to lasso one. You have to throw the loop up 9 or 10 feet from horseback at a galloping target and have it slip perfectly around the giraffe's neck. But the South African cowboys were skilled enough to accomplish this. And once you have lassoed a giraffe, what do you do? The cowboys rode alongside it until it tired and slowed down. Then they would leap off their horses, dig their boot heels into the dirt, and hold on for dear life. The giraffe would buck and thrash, trying to free itself, but it would eventually grow exhausted and slump down. By that point, Lutz Heck would come rumbling up on a transport truck

with an animal pen on the back. A dozen men would heave the exhausted giraffe up a ramp and inside. And that was that. New giraffes for the zoo. The other main animal Lutz Heck pursued in Africa was the rhinoceros. And if the thought of snagging baby giraffes makes you sad, the tale of capturing rhinos was sadder still. Once again, Heck targeted babies. Baby rhinos are easier to transport, and people at zoos like seeing babies and watching them grow up.

But of course, baby rhinos don't wander around solo. They are raised by mothers who, like most mammal mothers, are fiercely protective of their young. And rhinos don't scatter in panic like giraffes do. If their children are threatened, rhino mothers stand their ground, or charge with deadly force. In analyzing this situation, how to capture a baby rhino when mama rhino will not flee or let you anywhere near it, Lotzak devised what he considered an elegant solution. He would simply shoot the mother. More than any other tale in his memoir, the rhino story reveals the deep contradictions of Heck. Again, you cannot get through more than a page without appreciating his love of animals, his passion for them. His first

days driving through Africa were ecstasy. It was so rich in wildlife, he could barely scribble fast enough to jot down all the species he saw. He finally stopped trying and just stared around in awe. In one chapter, he also writes movingly about North American bison. As you might know, in the 1800s, American bison were wantonly slaughtered by settlers.

Many were shot from trains by passengers who had no intention of collecting them. They just blast it away and let the creatures languish and die. Millions upon millions of bison died for no reason. In his book, Heck captures just how cruel this was, calling it a senseless lust for destruction. He genuinely cares. At the same time, he does not hesitate to shoot a rhinoceros' mother simply to secure a juvenile for his zoo. He has the collector's mania.

I love something so much that I must possess it. To be fair, I guess rhinos were not endangered back in the 1930s, but neither were bison when settlers started shooting them. As Heck himself notes, there's no animal so numerous that humans can't exterminate it. Regardless, Lotz Heck was determined to have his baby rhino. He hired several native Africans as scouts and sent them out each morning to search for rhino tracks and rhino poop. One day, a pair of scouts hurried back and ran up to Heck, barely able to hide their grins. They told him, Faru Matoto Kule. baby rhino near. Heck had been lying on the ground by his tent. At these words, he sprang up, grabbed his rifle and spyglass, and ran off with a

few German colleagues on his heels. Half an hour later, he and the guides crept up to a cliff edge. It overlooked a thicket, and the guides insisted that a rhino mother and a cub were inside. Heck frowned. He could not see anything amid the branches. Then he noticed a clue. The clue was the oxpeckers, small birds with red bills and alarmingly yellow eyes. Oxpeckers sit atop rhinoceroses and pick off ticks and other insects. And as Lutz Heck peered down the cliff, he noticed oxpeckers flying into and out of the thicket. Through his spyglass, he studied the branches expectantly. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Then at long last, he saw something twitch. A rhino ear to keep insects away.

They waited all day long for the rhinos to emerge. Heck went mad with impatience. What the hell were they doing in there? Several times he considered tossing a stone down to flush them out, but he restrained himself. He could not risk them fleeing. Finally, at sunset, Mama Rhino got hungry. She pushed her way out of the thicket to nibble some leaves. Trotting behind her was a six-month-old rhino, around three feet tall at the shoulder. Everything depended on what happened next. Heck's German colleague took aim with a rifle.

He would get one and only one shot. That's because rhinos are odd. Again, zebras and most animals flee at the slightest threat. One gunshot and they all bolt. Rhinos are not like that. They can hear a gunshot and they just stand there, blinking dumbly. They don't care about guns or feel threatened. because they're so big. Now, rhinos will, of course, respond to other noises, like this, a rhino alarm call. If one rhino hears another bellowing like that, they flee. That behavior is similar to other big animals.

In fact, that's one reason American settlers could kill so many bison in the 1800s. Hunters realized they could shoot all the bison they wanted, as long as they killed them with one shot and prevented them from bellowing. There are recorded cases of people picking off 100 bison in a row from a herd, and the rest of the creatures just don't react. Sometimes, the assassins had to stop firing because their gun barrels got too hot. But if their aim was off a single inch and a shot bison bellowed in pain, the whole herd stampeded. That's what rhinos are like, too. And that's why that first shot was so important for Lutz Heck. If his colleague merely wounded Mama Rhino, she would bellow and both she and

Baby would take off. They had to shoot to kill. Heck's colleague took aim right behind the mother rhino's ear. Then he stilled his breath and bang, she fell dead. And the baby did not do a thing. It just kept nibbling leaves as if nothing happened. It eventually returned to the thicket. At this, Heck's men crept down and circled the thicket with a massive net. Then Heck and some scouts crept in to flush the baby out. Things did not go as planned. The baby charged a scout and knocked him into some thorns. Then the baby blasted into the net and nearly tore through it. A colleague of Heck's had to jump on top and start wrestling it.

Then Heck jumped on, as did others. Even then, the baby nearly got away. Each man got kicked in the stomach and trampled, just trying to hold on. But the hog pile eventually exhausted the baby. Hex slipped a collar on, and they loaded it into the truck. It turned out to be a boy, which they named Mototo, Swahili for child.

One of Hex's colleagues started feeding it. He mixed oat flour with condensed milk. For a bottle, they used a magnum of champagne, after, of course, cracking it open and drinking to their success. For a nipple on the magnum, they used a rubber teat that they had had specially crafted in Berlin to resemble a rhino nipple. And if you're wondering what rhino nipples look like, well, head over to patreon.com slash disappearing spoon and check out the pictures.

Matoto refused the nippled champagne bottle at first, but hunger finally won out and it began suckling. And while it was not exactly tame after that, Heck and crew found that they could pet it and take it on walks with a leash, like an armored poodle. This was cute in a way. But it really reflects Mototo's desperate need for a mother. It was willing to follow even fat, mustachioed Germans around, just for a little companionship. Heck's team captured a second juvenile rhino a few days later. This time, things went badly. Once again, scouts located a mom and baby in a thicket. But before they could get a sniper kill shot off, mom blasted through the bush and charged Heck. According to him, he was the definition of cool.

All the scouts leapt aside, but he stared the rhino down and took aim with his rifle. He fired only when the rhino was three yards away, so close that blood spattered him. What a hero, huh? Not surprisingly, the baby scampered off in the chaos. The Germans spent three days trying to track it amid rainstorms. They had given up when they finally spied it, and once again netted it and wrestled it into submission. Unfortunately, this baby died of a heart attack three days later. Heck blamed this on it being alone for three days in the cold rain.

But I'm dubious. A rhino can't handle some rain? There was also, you know, the stress of seeing its mother murdered and the terror of being captured. And even if you do blame the weather, it was alone in the rain because of Heck. But does he take responsibility for this? I will let you guess the answer. In his memoir, he chalked the death up to just one of those unlucky things that you can't help. Heck was not one to wallow, though. Indeed, he declared the Africa trip a wild success. His crew had captured dozens of exotic animals, which they transported to the coast in trucks. Then they boarded a ship for Europe, a modern-day Noah's Ark. Several animals fell seasick on the journey. Upon arrival in Europe,

trains chugged them to Berlin. Zoo-goers were soon delighting over Matoto and the lassoed giraffes and the rest of the menagerie. As a result of his triumph, Heck became a celebrity, so much so that he caught the eye of certain political movers and shakers in Germany then, the Nazis. In particular, Heck fell in with Herman Goering. And as we'll hear next week, Heck enlisted Goering in a crazy, mad scientist's scheme to resurrect extinct animals and bring them back to life.

This is the Disappearing Spoon Podcast. If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a five-star review, or tell friends and family. Reviews, subscriptions, and word of mouth really do help. Also, please support the show at patreon.com slash disappearing spoon. It costs as little as seven cents per day for ad-free shows. You can also get bonus episodes and signed books. You can find more incredible stories in my books. Check out samkeen.com.

You can also inquire about booking me as a speaker at your school or event. This episode was written, edited, and produced by me, Sam Keen. Thanks for listening.

Lassoing Giraffes and Wrasslin’ Rhinos

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