Dates

• Existence: 10 June 1844 - 14 April 1913

Biography

Carl Hagenbeck was a menagerie owne, animal trader, trainer and circus showman born on 10 June 1844, to Claus Gottfried Carl Hagenbeck (1810–1887), a fishmonger and exotic animal trader. Carl helped his father in the family business and at fourteen years of age he was given a set of wild animals, which encourage him to start his personal collection.

Carl embarked in his own animal hunting expeditions, travelling all over the world. from 1874, Carl started to combine ethnographic and zoological displays by showing indigenous people next to the animals. A year later he started to travel his shows around Europe and America.

Carl also formed the Carl Hagenbeck Circus, which exhibited a very successful group of animals trained by himself at the prestigious World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904.

In 1907, the Carl Hagenbeck Circus was purchased by circus showman B.E. Wallace, owner of The Great Wallace Circus, who merged both businesses into the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus inspite of Carl’s opposition to the use of his name. This same year Carl opened a zoo near Hamburg, Tierpark Hagenbeck, where animals were taken out of cages and displayed in an ‘open’ setting that tried to mimic their natural environment. At the time this was a groundbreaking development, which has since become the model for zoological displays.

Hagenbeck died on 14 April 1913, in Hamburg from a snake bite and his business was taken over by his sons.