Topsy The Elephant

A female Asian elephant, born in Southeast Asia. Topsy was secretly brought into the United States and added to the herd of performing elephants at the Forepaugh Circus, who fraudulently advertised her as the first elephant born in America. During her 25 years at Forepaugh, Topsy gained a reputation as a "bad" elephant and, after killing a spectator in 1902, was sold to Coney Island's Sea Lion Park. Sea Lion was leased out at the end of the 1902 season and during the construction of the park that took its place, Luna Park, Topsy was used in publicity stunts and also involved in several well-publicized incidents, attributed to the actions of either her drunken handler or the park's new publicity-hungry owners, Frederic Thompson and Elmer "Skip" Dundy. In 1903, Topsy the elephant, a circus attraction, was to be put to death for attacking a trainer. The trainer fed her a lit cigarette, so Topsy hardly had a baffling response.

Thompson and Dundy's end-of-the-year plans to advertise the opening of their new park, by euthanizing Topsy in a public hanging and charging admission to see the spectacle, were prevented by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The event was instead limited to invited guests and press only and Thompson and Dundy agreed to use a more sure method of strangling the elephant with large ropes tied to a steam-powered winch with both poison and electrocution planned as backup, a measure supported by the ASPCA. On January 4, 1903, in front of a small crowd of invited reporters and guests, Topsy was fed carrots laced with 460 grams of potassium cyanide, electrocuted and strangled, the electrocution being the final cause of death. Among the invited press that day was a crew from the Edison Manufacturing movie company who filmed the event. Their film of the electrocution part was released to be viewed in coin-operated kinetoscopes under the title Electrocuting an Elephant. It is probably the first filmed death of an animal in history.