“On the trail of the mercy bullet”: Pain,scientific showmanship,and the early history of animal tranquilizing,c. 1912–1932

Abstract

In June 1928, Captain Barnett W. Harris, an amateur naturalist from Indiana, arrived in Zululand to experiment on wild animals with his invention – the mercy bullet. This “bullet”consisted of a hypodermic needle filled with anesthetic drugs that could render an animal unconscious – an early model of what is now known as the tranquilizer gun. The history of this gun typically begins with Colin Murdoch, a New Zealand pharmacist and veterinarian, who patented the invention in 1959. While largely absent in the archives, through tracing popular science publications and press, this article exposes a longer history of animal tranquilizers from an unlikely source. Tracing Harris’s story allows this article to speak to different historical discourses that influenced his rise as a celebrated inventor, and later to his disappearance from the scientific arena. This article argues that debates about pain relief (for both humans and nonhuman animals) and developments in military technology at the turn of the twentieth century resulted in experiments with narcotic bullets, a precursor to this “mercy bullet moment.” While hailed across the press as the man who might transform animal capturing into a humane practice, the workings of Harris’s bullet remained ambiguous. Despite this, he promoted his invention through several lecture series and radio presentations to the American public in the 1930s, where elements of scientific showmanship can be observed. Overall, Harris’s omission from the history of animal tranquilizing demonstrates the multiple contingencies that define a moment of scientific “success” – or, in this case, push some into relative obscurity.

Introduction

On May 11th, 1929, a letter titled “Narcotic Bullet” was sent to the Secretary for the Interior of South Africa’s Union Government. ¹ This was a letter about weaponry, but not about warfare. It was sent from the Headquarters of the Department of Defense after having received information that the authorities of the National Zoological Gardens in Pretoria had commissioned a certain Captain Barnett Harris to capture wild animals painlessly by the means of a “mercy bullet.” ² The following information was urgently requested: the success of Harris’s experiments, how the bullet functioned, the nature of the drug used, and its time of action. There is no evidence to suggest that any of this information was received. This article is born out of curiosity about this knowledge gap, which propelled further investigations into Barnett Harris, an amateur naturalist from Indiana. Through this forgotten moment, this article argues that Harris’s mercy bullet challenges the existing narrative about the history of the tranquilizer gun, which traditionally begins with New Zealand pharmacist and veterinarian Colin Murdoch’s patenting of the invention in 1959. ³

However, tracing this history did not reveal one distinctive narrative that could explain why Harris’s contribution had been overlooked. His absence from the historical record signifies the various factors that determine scientific “success.” In tracing the circumstances that allowed his invention to be brought forward and then obscured, this article highlights how Harris’s “mercy bullet moment” intersects with various historiographical discourses linked to the field of science and technology studies.

This article argues that the “rise” of his invention is entangled with the ethical debates about the infliction of pain and unnecessary suffering (for both humans and non-humans) in the realm of warfare and medical practices that resulted in prohibitions of certain types of bullets and the first experiments with narcotic bullets in the early 1900s. These discussions were first brought to the forefront during the St. Petersburg declaration of 1868, which saw the prohibition of explosive bullets, and later the 1899 Hague Peace Convention, which banned the use of expanding bullets (known as dum-dum bullets). ⁴ The development of anesthesia is, of course, closely linked to this history. The term “anesthesia,” derived from the Greek term anaisthaesia, meaning “insensibility,” describes the loss of sensation to the entire or any part of the body. ⁵ The history of the tranquilizer gun can also be traced back to the polarizing debates on animal vivisection, which was supposed “to have been relieved of the greater part of its difficulty by the discovery of anesthetic.” ⁶ Historians have noted that the discussions that took place during the Royal Commission on Vivisection (1875) used anesthetics to address animal suffering, but ultimately still allowed the practice of physiological experimentation. ⁷ Harris’s supposed discovery of an “anesthetic bullet” for animals shows how the debates of this Commission had an afterlife. Using the terms “anesthetic” and “mercy,” Harris promoted his discovery to Americans concerned about alleviating animal suffering, but also with preserving the moral core of society. ⁸ News of his invention had reached a global audience through daily press and popular science mediums before he arrived in South Africa to experiment on wild animals in 1928.

Due to Harris’s scant presence in the archive, popular scientific publications are an essential methodological tool for this article. There is no further mention of him in the National Archives of South Africa and only one advertisement for his lecture series can be found in the Redpath Chautauqua Collection of the Iowa Online Repository. ⁹ Despite the claim that Harris was collecting animals for the Chicago Zoological Society, their archive proved to be another dead end, and any evidence of his relationship to the Field Museum of Chicago is lacking. ¹⁰ In stark contrast, Harris is alive across the proliferation of printed media: newspaper articles, radio snippets, and popular scientific and mechanical magazines.

What distinguished twentieth century popular science from its predecessors was not the content, but who did the popularizing. While “men of science” continued to see popular science as a medium for enlightenment and education, communication specialists increasingly took over the role of science popularization, driven by a public demand for news and entertainment. ¹¹ The transformation of the popular press is vital for our understanding of popular science, for it was through this new commercialized mass media that most people “viewed the world, including science.” ¹²

The historiography of popular science has been plagued with a paradoxical situation due to the difficulties in defining the object of inquiry. Katherine Pandora points out that these issues will continue to be raised because, by moving deeply and broadly into the study of science and popular culture, we inevitably challenge conventional notions of how to conceptualize “science” and what the terms “popularization” and “popular science” even mean. ¹³ In the United States, popular science had already emerged in the 1820s and 1830s within a culture in which the scientific leadership lacked the kind of central organization or privileged status that characterized British and European science. It was not until the 1840s that a vigorous circle of American scientific practitioners began to mount strategic challenges to the weak structural and societal status of “pure science.” ¹⁴ Newspapers, periodicals, books, lyceums, and local networks served as powerful sources for the diffusion of scientific information and represented science as a cultural activity for American communities. ¹⁵ Therefore, utilizing print media as a methodological tool has been conceptualized as a prime field for studying both the intellectual dynamics of popular science and the material practices that enable these pursuits, which this article undertakes.

John Burnham famously argued that the “high point of science popularization” in the United States came during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when “men of science” were passionate about the religion of science and filled with desire to campaign against error and superstition. ¹⁶ Fred Nadis concurs and argues that the nineteenth-century public’s interest in science did not deter, even with the rise of consumerism in the twentieth century. ¹⁷ Instead, the consumer culture’s cultivation of a public taste for “positive thinking” and technological progress lent a quasi-religious, quasi-scientific cast to American popular culture, which admitted many hybrids. ¹⁸ In contrast, Andreas Daum argues that the end of the nineteenth century might mark the end of the massive takeoff of popular science. From the late nineteenth century onward, many countries in the Northern Hemisphere strove to popularize knowledge while attacks were being launched on positivism and the belief in objectivity. Popularization, albeit in new forms, intensified as the modern physical sciences emerged, state bureaucracies expanded, and “big science” began to take shape. Aggressive forms of public advocacy for science were being developed. ¹⁹ Harris’s invention initially profited from this existing and ongoing popularization of science and public interest. However, this relationship was not long-lasting.

To make sense of the “fall” of his invention, or rather, its disappearance, this article traces the mismanagement of the tsetse fly problem in Zululand in the late 1920s to consider what factors drove Harris to abandon his experimental trip to South Africa. ²⁰ Historiographies of science in South Africa have moved beyond simple juxtapositions between Western science and local knowledge systems to show the diverse scientific thinking and practices that often existed separately from colonial institutions of power. ²¹ However, there is a lack of investigations of amateur naturalists such as Harris, who managed to gain authorization from formal institutions for experimentation but did not form part of any elite scientific network. Indeed, the idea that there existed a well-defined group of experts and laypeople is oversimplified. Agustí Nieto-Galan argues that the so-called amateurs, enthusiasts, and science popularizers – as much as the professionals or the experts – are dynamic agents in constructing knowledge boundaries and the making of scientific authority. ²² However, it was the nature of the space that Harris occupied – falling somewhere between scientist and showman – that contributed to his disappearance from the record of animal tranquilizing. Showmanship, broadly conceived, can be understood as one of the features of successful scientific exhibitions of all classes, yet the nature of showmanship as a profession has “always been uneven.” ²³ Aided by a proliferation of new digital resources, a revived critical reconsideration of the diverse content and theatrical character of nineteenth and early twentieth shows operating under the term of “popular science” can be observed in recent years. ²⁴ Scientific exhibitions and experimentations by showmen in Britain’s Victorian era have received the most historical attention. ²⁵ Renowned scientists like Louis Pasteur and Michael Faraday have a long history of dedicated studies. ²⁶ Harris, in comparison, was an amateur. While popular science mediums provide evidence for his invention, due to its ambiguous efficacy, it later proves to be characterized by elements of showmanship. This article recognizes that there is no linear relationship between the popularization of science and showmanship. Daum argues that the field of the history of popular science continues to be one characterized by imbalances, and it can only profit from promoting more “heterodoxy and microhistories” and by “appreciating a greater diversity of approaches and by exploring neglected avenues of investigation.” ²⁷

This article begins by providing a brief context of the changing animal-capturing techniques in the late nineteenth century. Next, it traces the paradox of military ethics that allowed for proposals of “pain-free” military technology to be considered in the early twentieth century. It proceeds to analyze the press reports on Harris’s invention and his experimental trip to Zululand in 1928. Upon his return, this article traces how his career took the form of scientific showmanship through promotions of his invention’s success despite the ambiguous evidence of its efficacy. Overall, this article gives density to the untraceable presence of Harris by revealing the circumstances that influenced the making and unmaking of this “mercy bullet moment.”

Changing methods: Mitigating the brutality of animal capture

Carl Hagenbeck would be the ideal interviewee for an investigation into the vast variety of methods used for capturing wild animals. ²⁸ After leaving school in 1859 at the age of fifteen, Hagenbeck devoted his attention to managing his father’s wild animal trading business, operating out of Hamburg, which thrived during the latter half of the nineteenth century. ²⁹ His catchers, who operated in dispersed locations across the Southern Hemisphere, were a group as diverse as their methods: naturalists, explorers, professional commercial hunters, and independent entrepreneurs. ³⁰ Their methods ranged from various forms of traps, particularly effective for hyenas, panthers, and baboons, to pitfalls, especially useful for hippopotami, due to their habit of allowing their young to walk ahead to ensure there is no danger lurking behind. ³¹ Capturing eland in Northern Rhodesia consisted of having thirty mounted hunters rushing in on all sides. While capturing the adults was deemed a “hopeless task,” the young bucks, with their “ungainly stilt-like legs,” were soon overtaken and secured by hunters who caught hold of their tails. ³² Similarly, in Atbara his catchers’ general method involved chasing the herd until the lagging young could be isolated from their parents and seized. Among giraffes and antelopes, this procedure was attended with little danger. However, in the case of rhinoceros and elephants, for which the demand was much greater, the capture was not so simple, as they would vigorously defend their young and as a rule could not be secured without killing the older ones first. This is echoed by J. R. Sherer, an animal capturer who supplied zoos across South Africa, South America, and India, who described his method:

It is easy to catch a giraffe. You first look for a female with a baby and chase it on horseback and lasso the young, put a bag over its head and take it away. Zebra are caught in the same way. To capture ferocious animals, you have to shoot the mother and catch its young. ³³

Methods used to catch animals for most of the nineteenth century portrayed in popular articles and books described the bloody and destructive methods employed with enthusiasm, until the turn of the twentieth century, where a “code of catching” was developed, both as a response to growing criticism as well as the professionalization of the practice. ³⁴ Harris’s invention grew from this desire to find a capturing method that was both efficient and cruelty-free. To understand this new need, it is necessary to look at the evolution of military technology and the changing legislation and perceptions around pain inflicted by weaponry.

The demise of the dum-dum bullet: An evolution of pain and military technology

The march toward civilization produced innumerable paradoxes, perhaps most apparent in the development and barring of armaments. Advances in science and technology in the late nineteenth century resulted in significant military progress before the start of the First World War (1914). In 1888, the British Army adopted the Lee-Metford rifle, also known as the Mark II, which fired a .303 bullet that was lighter, with a longer range, than the previous bullets employed (the Snider and the Martini-Henry). ³⁵ Despite these improvements, this bullet was flawed, as unless the bone or central organs were hit, it seemed to pass straight through the body of the opposition without incapacitating him. ³⁶ The development of the replacement for the Mark II bullet, one that had improved stopping power, was inspired by the types of ammunition used to shoot wild game. The bullet adopted by the British Army in 1896 was known as the Mark III, or the dum-dum bullet. ³⁷ Dum-dum bullets, named after the Dum Dum arsenal near Calcutta where they were first manufactured under the supervision of Captain N. S. Bertie Clay, were bullets that expanded or flattened easily in the human (or animal) body. ³⁸ Significantly, this bullet was not explosive, but expansive. On striking the bone, the bullet spread out, and then tore and splintered everything before it. The bullet “mushroomed inside the victim” and inflicted greater damage than the Mark II. ³⁹ These bullets were adopted by the British to be used in colonial “savage” warfare, and not against any “civilized” enemies, although they were heavily condemned by France and Germany. ⁴⁰ As justification for their condemnation, experiments with the bullet were carried out by Professor von Bruns of Tübingen, who characterized them as “inhumane” through presenting, at a congress of German surgeons in Berlin on April 16, 1898, photographs, skiagraphs, and limbs of animal cadavers that showcased the wounds caused by the bullet. ⁴¹

Expanding bullets were not listed on the program at The Hague Conference of 1899, but were raised by the Swiss and Dutch delegations at the first meeting of the military subcommission. ⁴² The Swiss delegate, Colonel Künzli, proposed the idea of outlawing the dum-dum bullet as he wondered “whether it would not be well to prohibit projectiles which aggravate wounds and increase the sufferings of the wounded.” ⁴³ Surgeon Major-General J. B. Hamilton and the British delegate, Sir John Ardagh, argued that the demands of colonial warfare warranted this deviation from the standards of European armaments. ⁴⁴ The fact that the British were considering new warfare for specific “savage” wars stemmed from the widespread opinion about the differing perception of pain according to race. ⁴⁵ In contrast to the European soldiers, Ardagh argued that the “natives” and “savages” “will go on fighting even when desperately wounded.” ⁴⁶ Similar sentiments were echoed by Major General Walker, writing to the Secretary to the Government of British India, where he stated that expanding bullets should not be used in “civilized warfare” because, while British soldiers would wait patiently for help, the populations in colonial contexts were not only insensible to their pain, but ignorant to the effects of their wounds. ⁴⁷ In the end, the prohibition was only rejected by two states, Great Britain and the United States. ⁴⁸ While Britain abandoned the use of the bullet in 1902, this was arguably due to their fear that it would be used against their own troops. ⁴⁹ Britain only formally signed the agreement in 1907.

For the British military, the dum-dum bullet was a strategic asset to maintain control over its empire, especially in British India. ⁵⁰ However, knowledge that the British Army was stockpiling the dum-dum bullets, not simply for “savage” warfare but as a standard issue for all military campaigns, was what triggered the controversy at The Hague. ⁵¹ The scrutiny of the dum-dum not only highlights the “involvement of medical science in the design of weapons,” but of the human–animal entanglement that resulted in advances and even pauses in gun technology, as it was experiments on animal cadavers that were used to persuade the delegates that the bullet should be banned. ⁵² This opposition to the expanding bullets has been lauded as “a significant ‘ethical’ moment in the genealogy of war,” a moment where force was being restrained. ⁵³ Yet, this very discussion at The Hague was not about a specific kind of weapon, but rather determining if certain ways of disabling and dismembering bodies were deemed to be acceptable even in “civilized warfare.” ⁵⁴ Here, the military paradox is evident, because killing and injuring during war (even of civilians) are not only permitted but are the characteristic acts of warfare, although this is often left out of historic accounts about the methods of military campaigns. ⁵⁵

Moral debates about the prevention of pain certainly lingered after The Hague and inspired further armament development. In 1912, experiments with “narcotic” or “painless” bullets were taking place in the United States. ⁵⁶ This news soon spread, advertising the development of a “humane warfare bullet” by Alexander Foster Humphrey, a scientist from Pittsburgh. ⁵⁷ The committee conducting experiments on his invention consisted of army officers, police officials, and sportsmen – another instance where amateur scientists and enthusiasts were contributing to scientific progress. ⁵⁸ This narcotic bullet contained a minute particle of morphia, which was carried in tiny wells in the steel jacket of a regulation army bullet (see Figure 1). ⁵⁹ In stark contrast to the dum-dum bullet’s destructive powers, this caused only a slight flesh wound. These reports advertised the bullet’s efficacy for hunting, self-defense, or even warfare, as a soldier being hit by the bullet would “fight no more that day” and instead simply fall asleep. ⁶⁰ Furthermore, men who received more serious wounds would suffer no agony once the narcotic was absorbed into their system, and those whose wounds were mortal would sleep away their last hours, thus “doing away with most of the battle-field horror.” ⁶¹ It was not long before this bullet was tested on animal bodies. In 1914, it was reported that specimens of the Kodiak bear of Alaska would be captured for the Panama–Pacific Exposition using Humphrey’s narcotic bullets. ⁶² O. L. Grimes, an attorney and naturalist of Kodiak, ordered 100 rounds of the narcotic cartridges. While the bullet would still be likely to kill an animal, Humphrey claimed that a bullet could be “put through the bear’s ear” to safely render the animal unconscious. ⁶³ However, in the Official Catalogue of Exhibitors for the Panama–Pacific International Exposition, a Kodiak bear is listed only in the sculpture section, indicating that no live bears had been caught to display. ⁶⁴ While Humphrey’s narcotic bullet would prove to be yet another stage of the military paradox – it certainly played no role in the chemical warfare campaigns of World War II – it was arguably a building block for Harris’s vision. While Humphrey’s bullet was designed to kill (painlessly), Harris wanted to create the impossible: to “shoot animals alive instead of dead.” ⁶⁵

Figure 1.

Sketch attached to the article by William P. Kennedy, “Bullet Used as Narcotic,” The Technical World Magazine, March 19, 1913.

Animal bodies and anesthesia: Popularizing the mercy bullet, c. 1927

Captain Barnett Walter Harris was variously described as a “scientist” and a “naturalist,” but also as a “world traveler,” “soldier,” “sportsman,” and “big game hunter.” ⁶⁶ What we can ascertain was that he was born in Indiana in 1876. His title of “captain” is less obvious, as while Indiana Magazine claimed it was awarded for “meritorious service” during World War I, records show that he returned from France in 1918 as a sergeant in the medical corps and as a captain in the Civilian Conservation Corps. ⁶⁷ Harris formed part of the active participation of amateurs in emerging specialties such as photography, spectroscopy, and reflection telescopes. ⁶⁸ He developed a new technique to create “scientific” education films by using two cameras set in positions corresponding to the right and left eye, which were double printed on one film. ⁶⁹ Using this method, he and his wife, Lucile Berg, recorded the life cycle of the bee, toad, wasp, butterfly, and various forms of aquatic life. In Binghamton, New York, in 1925, Harris captured all phases of a total eclipse for the first time, and duplicated this feat in Sumatra in 1926 (see Figure 2). ⁷⁰ Despite being frequently described as a big game hunter in the press, Harris aligned himself with the conservationists, claiming to be “heavily against big game hunters: wealthy men who went into Africa for the sole purpose of killing as many as possible for trophies who have already caused some of the most beautiful African animals to disappear from earth.” ⁷¹

Figure 2.

“To take ‘movies’ of sun’s eclipse,” Captain Barnett Harris of the Harvard Eclipse Expedition. Image courtesy of Scientific American, 134(2), 1926, p.109.

Despite his lack of formal training, Harris developed the mercy bullet that was first captured by American journalists early in 1927, and later by popular science and mechanical magazines. ⁷² With the growth of cheap printing processes, facilitated by technological advances such as rotary systems, the popularity of mass-circulation magazines was a pivotal feature of the emerging American print culture. ⁷³ The rise in the local populace’s interest in science culminated with a change in the style of press reporting. For example, Popular Science (founded in 1872 under the name The Popular Science Monthly) was bought by the Modern Publishing Company and merged with several other scientific magazines in 1915 to interest a broader audience. ⁷⁴ This change was dramatic, transforming a scholarly journal that included ten to twenty photographs into a magazine that included hundreds of short, easy-reading articles accompanied by illustrations. This print culture drew on the American fascination with industriousness, entrepreneurship, and an enduring “culture of improvement,” which drove the collective discourse of these media sources. ⁷⁵ These magazines strove to balance extended discussions of science with readability. ⁷⁶ The “science-in-context” stories sought to show the importance and implications of the latest discoveries and inventions in a broader perspective, as can be witnessed by Harris’s mercy bullet, which was promoted as an invention that would change the capture of wild animals on a global scale.

The New Britain Herald documented his invention, claiming that Harris was a “sportsman and representative of the Chicago Zoological Society.” ⁷⁷ While Americans were the first to notice, it was not long before the news spread across the water. According to the Illustrated London News, Harris was going to collect specimens for the new zoological park at Riverside, Illinois. ⁷⁸ He was reputedly set to travel to Borneo to secure orangutans and gorillas – animals easy to shoot but extremely difficult to capture alive. ⁷⁹ While Harris boldly claimed that inquiries about his bullet came from “practically all countries,” it was certainly widely reported. ⁸⁰ Images were also included alongside these reports. Scientists utilized visual devices both as tools for investigation and to create new ways of demonstrating ideas and results. The public brandishing of visuals became the primary means to broadcast discoveries and promote the status of science. ⁸¹ The predominant images of science as an activity centered upon the persons of the scientists themselves. Martin Kemp describes two main factors behind the production of scientific portraits: firstly, the conviction that the individual is important; secondly, the social desire to establish scientists as persons worthy of portrayal and prosperity. In the same line, “portraits” of machines, instruments, and devices were also promoted as the technological heroes of scientific advance. All such images were loaded with social significance and intended to make a point. ⁸²

In June 1927, descriptions and sketches of Harris’s invention were featured in Popular Mechanics Magazine and Popular Science (see Figures 3 and 4). ⁸³ In contrast to the narcotic bullet, Harris’s “bullet” was equipped with a hypodermic needle filled with chemicals at the base. In a report for the New York Times in 1928, Harris provided further details, claiming that the chemicals were made up of a compound that acted almost instantly on the animal’s nervous system, causing temporary loss of locomotion. ⁸⁴ A consensus across all sources claimed that when this needle struck an animal, an “anesthetic drug” was released into the animal’s bloodstream. ⁸⁵ Here, the ambiguity of Harris’s invention begins to surface, which is also linked to the style of reporting that characterized this era. In many cases, journalists copied stories told in popular science periodicals and reprinted them in the daily press. This can be witnessed by tracing Harris’s story, which saw many similarly worded articles promoting his “humane” invention without providing further details of its makeup.

Figure 3.

A sketch of Harris’s mercy bullet featured in Popular Science, 1927.

Figure 4.

A sketch of Harris’s mercy bullet featured in Popular Mechanics Magazine, 1927.

There are no clear descriptions (from Harris himself or other sources) detailing the exact combination of drugs the mercy bullet contained. In Graham Linscott’s biography on the South African conservationist Ian Player, it is speculated that Harris’s bullet was covered with a “curare substance.” ⁸⁶ Curare, a drug derived from tree bark and applied to blow-dart tips by South American Indians to paralyze and capture animals, prevents muscle contraction and stops all movement, including breathing. ⁸⁷ Claude Bernard, known as “the father of modern experimental medicine,” began experimenting with the drug in 1844. While it could prove lethal, in the right quantities, curare’s neuromuscular blocking functions made invasive procedures easier and the drug became a common experimental tool in physiological practice. ⁸⁸ However, during the nineteenth century, doubts began to spread: what if paralyzed animals could still feel pain, but were unable to express it? ⁸⁹ The unsettled nature of the science of curare can be witnessed in the division among physiologists during the 1875 Royal Commission on Vivisection. ⁹⁰ Indeed, after the Cruelty to Animals Act was passed in Britain in 1876, which imposed restrictions on the performance of painful experiments on animals, curare was not considered an anesthetic. ⁹¹ It is plausible that Harris’s compound was made up of a combination of sleep-inducing agents, such as barbiturates, which were practically the only drugs used as sedatives and hypnotics between the 1920s and mid-1950s, as well as morphia (as was used by Humphrey), along with a neuromuscular blockade like curare. ⁹² However, this is speculative, and if it was only curare that Harris used, the showmanship of his invention is already evident in his mislabeled description of his “anesthetic bullet.” Here, the anesthetized animal body was being reimagined again as a measure of scientific and moral progress, as it had been during the 1875 Commission. ⁹³ Through labeling his invention as an “anesthetic,” Harris was building on the historical links between this concept and its prevention of purposeless cruelty. Harris’s invention looked good on paper, but did it work? Through analyzing his expedition to Zululand (1928–9), and the reports that followed, this article turns to answer this question.

A foolproof method? Harris’s experiments in Zululand, c. 1928–1929

Historians have studied the diverse network of scientists that spent time in colonial contexts, drawn by the increasing demand for trained officers and a desire to generate their own research and conduct a wider range of experimentation. However, they have shown that scientists who worked in the colonies were not necessarily particularly talented, and while southern African problems attracted some leading international scientists, others were among the less successful in their profession. Many failed outright in their experiments. ⁹⁴ Failure in the scientific field was arguably most clearly witnessed in southern African colonies attempts at controlling the tsetse fly problem. This “problem”was the widespread animal trypanosomiasis disease known as nagana, an anglicization of a Zulu term uNakane (meaning depressed or low in spirits), which had been causing devastation to domestic livestock in the Zululand area since the reign of the Zulu chief Mpande (1840–72). ⁹⁵ This disease, caused by a minute blood parasite known as trypanosome, was transmitted from infected game to livestock by the Glossina (tsetse fly). ⁹⁶ Significantly, wild animals acted as hosts to the fly while remaining immune to the disease, which transformed them into a new threat for farmers. Efforts to control nagana created a lively debate between big game hunters, who knew the fly through experiencing them in their travels, and European-based bacteriologists, who claimed to know the fly through their training in laboratory science. ⁹⁷ Harris operated outside the spectrum of scientists as well as big game hunters, allowing this article to explore a unique avenue of scientific emergence in South Africa during the early twentieth century.

On June 11, 1928, an “interesting visitor” was reported to have arrived in Durban. ⁹⁸ This article, repeating many that had gone before, stated that Harris had been sent by the Chicago Zoological Society and the Field Museum of National History to obtain specimens of African fauna using his mercy bullet. ⁹⁹ Several sources confirmed that it was the “authorities of the Pretoria Zoo” who had commissioned Harris to capture animals in South Africa. ¹⁰⁰ From Durban, Harris was going to Zululand with “full optimism of his invention.” ¹⁰¹ It was further stated that he was “keenly interested” in the rumor that the government proposed to relocate white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum) from Zululand to the Kruger National Park, where they had formerly lived – an undertaking in which his invention could play a prominent part. He spent six months experimenting on various animals in the Hluhluwe region before claiming that “he was confident that his invention worked.” ¹⁰² Evidence of the success of these experiments can only be found in press sources, and there were experts who doubted his design, such as Albert Le Souëf, an Australian zoologist, who claimed Harris’s method to be “preposterous tommyrot.” ¹⁰³ He argued that the bullet would likely cause death or severe injury seeing as the hypodermic needle should be inserted just under the skin – an impossible feat if it was projected through the air at a high velocity. ¹⁰⁴

Nevertheless, in March 1929, Harris traveled to the Hluhluwe Game Reserve to capture a rhinoceros for the Pretoria Zoo. ¹⁰⁵ While this might allude to their trust in his method, the institution had been investigating methods to obtain a rhinoceros for their exhibition for several years and were possibly open to any means available to do so. ¹⁰⁶ One month later, Harris successfully used a mercy bullet to tranquilize a black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis) cow in order to capture her baby. The young rhinoceros was caught, but died in transit before the zoo could receive it, a frequent occurrence in the wild animal trade. ¹⁰⁷ While the bullet successfully stunned the female rhinoceros, when Harris returned to load up her baby, the mother appeared and suddenly “tossed him into the bush,” indicating that his bullet “only had a temporary effect.” ¹⁰⁸ However, a temporary knock-out effect is arguably the goal for any tranquilizing bullet, which indicates that it worked to some degree, but any further experiments with larger wild animals did not take place.

But, by July 1929, Harris witnessed significant changes to the management of wild animals in Zululand. He became outraged at the fact that the provincial authorities were not only permitting shooting in the very heart of the Hluhluwe Reserve – but were ordering it. ¹⁰⁹ He abandoned his trip, claiming to be “[d]isgusted by the wasteful and unnecessary destruction of game by hired gunmen who are not even good shots, the muddled and inefficient handling of problems of the game reserves, and the frittering away with cold indifference of one of its finest assets.” ¹¹⁰

This game extermination order was one of the measures undertaken to combat the nagana problem. The first of such can be traced to October 1896, when a large game hunt was organized. However, in 1897, the numbers of nagana reduced with the onset of the rinderpest epidemic that killed large numbers of cattle and susceptible ungulates, and eradicated trypanosomes from northern South Africa. Around the turn of the twentieth century, many scientists and officials in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia argued that this proved that the disease could and should be controlled through game slaughter. ¹¹¹ This resulted in a wholesale slaughter of wild animals on numerous occasions, by order of the government, and later fly-trapping exercises (an anti-nagana campaign) carried out by Robert Harris. ¹¹² With no cure or vaccine, there seemed to be no obvious method of managing the disease and little consensus among scientists about the effects of these eradication campaigns. Conservationists, on the other hand, such as James Stevenson-Hamilton, warden of the Kruger National Park, along with Ernest Warren, director of the Natal Museum, heavily criticized the campaigns and expressed fears that the wildlife in the province might never recover. ¹¹³

In 1928, the year Harris arrived, the Natal Provincial Council appointed a Game Advisory Committee chaired by C. F. Clarkson to advise on the nagana issue. ¹¹⁴ At a conference held at Hluhluwe on November 19, 1928, ten proposals were formulated to eradicate the problem. Some of these solutions included fencing areas between the reserves and settlements, providing water supplies for game so they need not search outside the reserves, destroying surplus game, and allowing farmers to destroy wandering game. After Clarkson’s recommendations, the Natal Provincial Administration was persuaded to finance a campaign aimed at reducing the number of game in the reserves and then to try to create a buffer zone around the reserves that was free of game and the tsetse fly. ¹¹⁵ This buffer zone on the outside of the Umfolozi Reserve was divided into seven sections, each assigned a white game ranger and ten skilled black hunters. ¹¹⁶ Through this campaign, in just two years – 1929–31 – more than 35,000 animals were killed (not accounting for the amount of game shot by private hunters under permit). ¹¹⁷ Ironically, the absence of game caused hungry tsetse flies to disperse to wider regions than ordinally traveled and led to increased incidence of nagana. ¹¹⁸

By this stage, Harris had already left South Africa in protest against the game slaughtering. Harris’s experiments were cut short and largely overshadowed by the nagana eradication campaigns, which met with little to no success. Perhaps choosing Zululand as the arena to conduct his experiments was a strategic decision for Harris, knowing that the nagana problem had already created a brewing controversy about “what was science and what was not” across southern and east Africa. ¹¹⁹ However, it was his anesthetic bullet’s unclear efficacy, especially for larger game like the rhinoceros, that was the greatest factor in his early exit. ¹²⁰ Despite this, Harris continued to promote the success of his invention through various media once he returned home, where several methods of scientific showmanship can be observed.

Unsustainable showmanship: Harris’s reported success after the Zululand experiments, 1929–1932

Despite the ambiguity of the working of the mercy bullet in the field, Harris continued to promote his invention upon his return to the United States. For example, he published a three-part special feature series in the New York Times about his “successful” expedition to South Africa. Here, he highlighted the triumph of his experiments on breeds of buck as well as bigger game such as the rhinoceros cow mentioned earlier, including photographic ‘evidence’ (see Figure 5). ¹²¹ However, promotions in the press was not the only medium utilized by Harris.

Figure 5.

Image courtesy of the New York Times, “Mercy Bullets Tested amid Perils of Jungle,” December 29, 1929.

In 1930, he conducted a demonstration of his bullet to more notable “men of science” at the New York Livestock Exchange. These men included Raymond Garbutt, chief veterinarian of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and Dr. Hatcher, of Cornell Medical School. ¹²² Here, he showed how a sheep could be put to sleep using one of his bullets and that the effects of the drugs wore off entirely. ¹²³ This demonstration (a notable example of scientific showmanship, seen in Figure 6) visually showcased his success only for a brief moment. In 1931, Harris was called upon to assist State Game Officials of Michigan to solve the starving deer problem in the swamps around Alpena. The mercy bullet’s supposed ability to render animals unconscious was the method proposed to capture and transport the deer to other swamp areas, where there would be enough food sources and no danger of over-browsing. However, his bullet was ineffective – while one deer was put to sleep for seventy minutes, it killed two others. This was apparently “all the mercy bullet accomplished over several weeks of experimentation.” ¹²⁴ While the officials stated that his invention could “become valuable in the future,” it was doubtful whether the state would resort to it again. ¹²⁵ Despite this startling letdown, Harris continued to promote his invention to the American public in person and over the radio from 1932 to 1933 through a lecture series titled “On the Trail of the Mercy Bullet.” ¹²⁶ Marcel LaFollette argues that the 1930s saw American radio networks become increasingly focused on entertainment and began pressuring popularizers to emphasize scientific personalities over facts. ¹²⁷

Figure 6.

Harris demonstrating the efficacy of his invention at the New York Livestock Exchange in November 1930. Image courtesy of Science and Invention, November 1930.

Popular lecturing that incorporated showmen, including science popularizers, has been explored by historians as a diverse and unruly phenomenon. It was at once “a formative class practice, a market transaction, an instrument of reform and a marker of civic identity.” ¹²⁸ The lyceum lecture circuit of the antebellum era had spread to the United States from England in 1826 with the purpose of creating local societies that would sponsor lectures, establish libraries, build collections, and improve schools. The duty of the lyceum lecturer was to educate and uplift. ¹²⁹ While this lecture culture played most prominently into the nineteenth-century American imagination, Harris represents the genre’s evolution in the early twentieth century. During his presentations on the Stout Lyceum program in Wisconsin for 1932 and across the states of Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky, Harris functioned within the arena of showmanship, among other performing artists who were there to entertain. ¹³⁰

Angela Ray argues that while the dual function of lyceums was to educate and entertain, the entertainment function grew increasingly prominent in the postwar period as it made room for humorists, vocalists, musicians, and dramatic performers. ¹³¹ Harris formed part of diverse programs featuring quartet groups and comedy acts. ¹³² However, he also shared the auditorium with other scientific showmen such as Dr. Luther S. H. Gable, a supposedly “distinguished scientist who made radium popular.” ¹³³ While many showmen lectured with the help of props, slides, and visual experiments, Harris seemed to rely only on the spoken word to promote the “unpublished inside story of the personality of the man and his work.” ¹³⁴ Martin Hewitt claims that the spectacle of the platform increasingly inhered in the person delivering the lecture, and a powerful platform presence became almost a prerequisite for lecturing success. ¹³⁵ Elements of Harris’s platform presence can be witnessed in the descriptions of his “fine sense of humor,” as well as his “novel, thrilling and entertaining” talk of “sensational hunting trips.” He also appealed to a specific type of American morality, as his talk was promoted as an account that would not “offend the most sensitive lover of wild animals.” ¹³⁶ While his lecture series showcased his invention for a while longer, after his failed attempt in Michigan, there is no evidence to suggest that Harris’s mercy bullet was called upon again. Slowly, he disappeared from popular press reports as well. Harris expressed a belief that with further adjustments of the anesthetic charge of the drug in each hypodermic projectile, his device would “work like a charm.” ¹³⁷ Here, he was not far from the truth, as it was through the development of effective drugs in the 1950s that both the nagana and tranquilizing problem would be solved.

The eradication of nagana from Zululand rests on the development of synthetic insecticides, most notably DDT and HCH, which were extensively used for aerial and ground spraying campaigns in the early 1950s. ¹³⁸ The breakthrough needed for the modern-day tranquilizer gun was built on a previous invention of Colin Murdoch. He transformed the medical profession in 1956 through his creation of a disposable plastic syringe which could prevent contamination. ¹³⁹ Branching from this, he developed a modified tranquilizer gun consisting of interchangeable barrels for different caliber syringe projectiles. Each gun had a dial which could be set to any of thirty-two positions. In contrast to Harris’ hypodermic needle with a glass chamber, the syringes were made of strong, light polycarbonate plastic with a needle threaded onto the front, which allowed for better accuracy. ¹⁴⁰ Improvements continued as Murdoch discovered that the anesthetic drugs that were commonly used were causing animals to die from their excessive physiological response to being darted. ¹⁴¹ Expanding from this, Dr. Antonie (Toni) Harthoorn, a British veterinary scientist located in East Africa, started trials with stronger opioids derived from morphine in the early 1960s. ¹⁴² He was called upon by Ian Player to assist him and his team in the task of Operation Rhino. ¹⁴³ They experimented with combinations of tranquilizers and narcotics, models of guns, and time lapses on administering an antidote. ¹⁴⁴ Continued testing over the next three years led to the development of M99, an immobilization drug that would become critical to the operation’s success. ¹⁴⁵ It contained etorphine, an opioid stronger than morphine that is still one of the mainstays of anesthesia for wildlife-capturing today. ¹⁴⁶ Player argued that while their team had achieved immobilization for white rhinos in the 1960s, there had been an American who had once “tried to shoot a black rhino with a mercy bullet covered with a curare substance.” ¹⁴⁷ Harris’s bullet certainly did not achieve the efficacy that these later veterinarians mastered. However, what Harris’s mercy bullet reveals is that practices of scientific showmanship by amateurs were hybrid spaces where significant contributions toward scientific development could be showcased. It becomes our job as historians to trace these stories that the scientific arena may have discarded.

Conclusion

By the mid-1960s, Colin Murdoch’s invention of the tranquilizer gun would become widely recognized as the most humane and efficient method of capturing and transporting wild animals. However, despite a thin archival visibility, this article has exposed a longer history of animal tranquilizers from an unlikely source: an amateur naturalist from Indiana, Captain Barnett Harris. Through utilizing popular science media, this article has traced the rise and demise of this inventor, whose “mercy bullet” allowed him to capture the attention of the American public and global scientific arena from 1927 to the early 1930s.

This article argues that the rise of this invention can be traced to the increased brutality in warfare, which saw countries voice concerns about the pain caused by ammunition. This led to the first experiments with narcotic (pain-free) bullets, in 1912, accredited to Alexander Humphrey of Pittsburgh. Drawing from this breakthrough, Harris developed the mercy bullet, an “anesthetic” bullet that could render an animal unconscious for safe capture. Here, Harris drew from the historical link between the “animal body” and “anesthetic” as concepts that promoted a movement away from animal suffering. In 1928, he traveled to Zululand, South Africa, to conduct experiments with this bullet on wild animals.

When it came to the actual workings of the bullet, however, Harris fell short. The approach behind his technique was only formally adopted thanks to the development of efficient opioids and Murdoch’s plastic syringe. In Zululand, specifically, Harris operated outside of the network of colonial scientists, who were failing to eradicate nagana from the area. Harris claimed the game-slaughtering campaigns resulted in his early departure, but this was arguably a useful scapegoat. Despite this, Harris continued promoting his invention to the American public upon his return in 1930, where different elements of scientific showmanship can be observed. His most notable style of showmanship can be witnessed through his lecture and radio series, which were successful despite the inconclusive evidence of his invention’s efficacy. Harris formed part of lyceum programs with other performing artists, where he relied on his platform presence to enthrall the public with his “thrilling” adventures of capturing and “trailing” wild animals.

Overall, our omission of Harris’s contribution to the advancements of animal-capturing techniques reveals the various outliers that determine scientific “success.” Although popular science publications and daily press in the early twentieth century could provide a platform for amateur scientists to reach global audiences, this attention was fleeting. While science was for all, only a few scientists achieved lifelong success. Later, even if these figures had contributed toward knowledge production, they might easily, as Harris did, slip by without historical recognition.