[quirky music]
- Did you know that there was a time when a family vacation
meant your toddler riding an alligator?
- Families can just mingle, pose freely with no barriers
between them and one of nature's most efficient,
ruthless, and deadly predators.
- It's like Jurassic Park with worse fences.
- Or how about riding the world's fastest bird?
- 40 miles an hour on the back of a dinosaur with feathers
is the thrill of a lifetime.
- Or when you could order a live monkey
from the back of a comic book.
- You'd open the box and that monkey would jump out
and bite the first person it sees.
- There's a part of me that knows
that this was irresponsible,
but then there's a part of me that would be like,
"Oh yeah, baby, sign me up."
- These are the things we used to do
for fun, for money, or maybe out of boredom
that we'll never see again.
Were they dangerous? Certainly.
Deadly? Occasionally.
But, boy, wasn't it exciting?
[dramatic music]
[dramatic thud]
[quirky music]
What's more adorable than a cuddly animal?
You see one and you wanna reach out and touch it.
And for a lot of American history,
that's exactly what we did.
The problem? Well, sometimes the animals touched back.
[contemplative music]
- It's the 1970s
and vacations are really considered a luxury.
And only really a privileged few
can afford trips to Disney World
or some far away theme park.
- So it becomes the age of the road trip.
Families pile into station wagons
and look for fun holiday ideas
that are within driving distance.
- [Henry] In 1972, plans are announced
for a new amusement park in West Milford, New Jersey
that promises to be wild, thrilling, and car-friendly.
- [Jason] It's a new kind of zoo and radically different.
Here the animals roam free.
But the people aren't in mobile cages,
they're in little family cars.
- What's more American than like,
"I don't even wanna experience nature
unless it's through the windshield of my car."
- [Henry] This bold new attraction
is dubbed "Jungle Habitat",
and it opens to great fanfare in July of 1972.
- [Kavitha] But this is not a petting zoo.
These are some of the most dangerous animals in the world.
- Jungle Habitat brings in 70 lions.
The San Diego Zoo only has nine. [lion grunts]
- In all over 1,500 animals up close, unencumbered,
and, very importantly, unfenced.
- [Kavitha] Jungle Habitat becomes a success almost
off the bat.
It has 250,000 visitors in just its first three months.
Cars are lining up for up to seven miles just to get in.
[lion purrs]
- [Jason] But a real African safari,
you are with trained professionals in vehicles
especially designed for the purpose.
In this case,
you're just driving through in the family car.
- [Kavitha] Animals are walking around
looking at you like you're lunch.
- [Henry] In this drive-through attraction,
a vehicle is not the safe space
visitors think it will be.
[lion snarls]
- [Jason] From day one, cars are basically under siege.
Baboons start to tear at cars.
Lions and tigers, they're pawing
and scratching at the sides of your car.
But most people, one of the animals on their car,
that's the thrill.
They actually put this right in their logo.
[suspenseful music]
- [Adam] You have to keep the windows rolled up.
But this is in the early '70s,
before air conditioning came standard in most cars,
which means that on like an 85-degree day in the summer,
it's about 110 degrees in the car.
- [Austin] These cars are dangerously hot.
So people begin rolling down their windows.
- [Adam] Just months after opening, disaster strikes.
A man has rolled the window down
to call and taunt and tease a lion.
Let me just let that sink in.
A human being is teasing a lion.
- [Kavitha] And the lion reaches in and mauls him from the front.
He turns around and gets him from the back
and somehow they managed to escape.
- [Adam] Believe it or not, the guy doesn't sue the park.
He blames himself
because, you know, he taunted a lion.
- [Henry] Most park visitors are thrilled
by the wild interactive experience.
But Jungle Habitat's suburban neighbors
are not so happy with park security.
- Two wolves sneak out from under a fence,
baboons escape and send, like, local schools into lockdown.
You got kangaroos and emus walking down the street.
- Nobody thinks about the neighborhoods
around these animal parts.
If those fences aren't done the right way,
you got yourself a crocodile in your pool
and a lion in your driveway.
- [Kavitha] In addition to all of these obvious safety issues,
it's actually turns out really expensive
to run a park like this.
- [Jason] Just to feed the lions alone
requires 1,400 pounds of horse meat per day.
Even though they've got lots of customers coming through,
they're actually hemorrhaging money.
- [Kavitha] After just four years of this death trap of a
zoo, Jungle Habitat finally closes.
[lion grunts]
- So a lion safari didn't work out.
But there was a time not long ago
when you didn't have to drive anywhere to see wild animals
because they lived right in your home.
- Throughout the 1900s,
having strange pets is definitely
an American fascination.
President Calvin Coolidge has a pet raccoon.
Elvis Presley has a chimpanzee.
Tippi Hedren, the actress, Melanie Griffith's mother,
has a pet lion.
I mean, this is something that's
definitely a status symbol.
- [Henry] But in the 1950s, an unconventional animal
becomes America's latest obsession.
- One bizarre animal that became a pet
for people to own is the skunk.
- Skunks are the smelliest animals out there.
If you get one of these in your neighborhood,
you can smell it from a mile or two away.
But somehow they become pets.
- Skunks have been a comic trope for decades.
They're in Abbott and Costello, they're in Disney movies,
they're in The Three Stooges,
and of course, one of my favorites, Pepe Le Pew.
- [Hakeem] Because cartoon skunks are so cute,
people are startin' to soften to them.
So some enterprising breeders start thinkin',
"Hey, skunks are having a moment.
Could people buy them as pets?"
- [Henry] Turns out they will.
- So how do you market a skunk as a pet?
Well, you tell people they're easily trainable,
they're smart, cuddly, kind.
- [Natalia] People buy them at fairs and shops
and even through the mail, Sears and Spiegel,
two big mail order catalogs, sell them.
And the idea is that this intelligent,
cute friend of yours won't spray you
and will be your companion.
- [Jason] And you can see the appeal.
They're cute. They're not super big.
Kids would love them because kids love weird stuff.
The other thing that skunks give you are something
that maybe no one else in your neighborhood has.
And so suddenly you've got something
people are gonna wanna see.
And there was such a big part of society
about sort of showing off.
If you can get the newest or the coolest,
maybe you can get the weirdest and have the strangest pet.
"I don't have a border collie. I have a skunk."
That's status.
- I would absolutely own a pet skunk.
How fun would that be?
I would love to have a pet skunk.
First of all, they eat ticks.
So if you ever get a tick, you're set
'cause your pet skunk is gonna eat your ticks off of you.
So that's handy.
They're smart, they're social, they're cute.
Have you ever seen a skunk with its babies?
They're so cute.
My favorite thing about skunks, hands down, literally,
is that they can do a handstand
and point their butt at you over their back
and spray you in the face.
Like, that's awesome.
- [Rutledge] The idea for a lot of people
is you could get a skunk and train it.
You could put it on a leash
and, like, take it for a walk around the neighborhood.
Everyone's gonna love it.
They're gonna wanna come up and pet it.
- Oh, baby, baby. What am I going to do with you?
- [Henry] Soon skunks are so coveted.
Pet shop owners can't keep them in stock.
But what about the smell?
- [Jason] Might sound insane, but these are skunks
that have had their stink glands surgically removed.
[ominous music]
- [Henry] But while these skunks
might lack their stink glands,
they still have their teeth.
- You would think that a descented skunk is safe
because it's basically had its ammunition taken away.
But the thing is that it can still bite you
and it can still scratch you.
- [Hakeem] Skunks can become aggressive when threatened.
And they can pack a punch.
I mean, their bite is strong enough to break your finger.
They have nearly one-inch fangs
that can cause deep puncture wounds.
And they also have these long curved claws
for ripping through soil and roots
that can also slice you open pretty easily too.
- [Henry] But scratches and bites
might be the least of your concerns.
- Skunks are actually the most common carrier of rabies.
And they're actually also the most common animal
to transmit rabies to humans,
which includes you, their owner.
- [Natalia] These bites happen fairly often.
By the time the CDC starts tracking them in the 1970s,
they find nearly 200 incidents.
- [Dan] If there's a chance, you have to treat it seriously.
And so for a person at that time,
that means 20 shots of the vaccine in the stomach.
Really painful, no fun at all.
- [Henry] As rabies scares rise, the government steps in.
- [Natalia] Due to this concern over rabies,
there are ordinances all over
that don't permit them as pets.
And right now, the vast majority of states
still have those on the books.
- [Hakeem] Today, we got all these snowflakey pets,
like cats and dogs that are hypoallergenic
or bred not to bark.
Don't you kinda miss the days
when you could just pick up a catalog
and order your children a rabid wild animal
for just 25 bucks?
- Maybe next time just go with a kitten.
- Lots of people enjoy riding horses and mules,
and, depending on where you live, camels and elephants too.
But did you know that there was once a time
when you could ride birds?
- [Dan] In the 1880s, a Brit named Edwin Cawston
imports a whole bunch of ostriches
to his farm in South Pasadena, California.
He's planning to get rich
selling the feathers of these birds
because they're really big in ladies fashion at the time.
- [Kavitha] Most people in South Pasadena
have never seen an ostrich up close before.
They're like these dinosaurs running around.
Pretty soon people are lining up to gawk at the ostriches,
and he realizes he has this entirely different business.
People will pay to see the ostriches on his farm.
- [Henry] Cawston's Ostrich Farm
opens in the city of South Pasadena in 1896.
Newspapers are soon raving about it
as one of the nation's most fascinating attractions.
- [Brian] I would go to an ostrich farm.
I mean, the whole point of it
is like you're seeing something that you would never see.
In no world am I running into an ostrich on Staten Island.
- [Kavitha] People are fascinated by how fast they can
move, with a top speed of over 40 miles an hour.
It's not long before Cawston realizes
that if people are going to pay to pet these things,
they will pay even more to ride them.
- [Dan] Cars aren't a thing.
So for the average person,
40 miles an hour on the back of a dinosaur with feathers
is the thrill of a lifetime.
- [Henry] Of course, if you can ride ostriches,
that also means you can race them.
- [Dan] Ostrich racing becomes a real thing on the farm,
but it's really hard.
You can't put a saddle on them.
Only do your best to balance
and hang on for dear life while they take off.
Most ostrich races finish
with nobody actually on their bird anymore.
- Ostriches, in many ways, are the worst possible animal
to pick for a roadside attraction
because they're very aggressive.
They're also very territorial.
That makes them unpredictable.
- [Worker] Hey!
- Ostriches are not really built to be ridden,
and they don't really like to be ridden.
So there tend to be injuries that's gonna happen
when you have people interacting with large wild animals.
- [Kavitha] There's one incident where a male ostrich
kicks a farm worker 15 feet,
and then corners him and starts pecking at him
and attacking him.
And other people have to come and pull the bird off of him
before he kills this man.
- [Rutledge] In 1913, in the Tournament of Roses, there was a
race and one rider was actually thrown off his ostrich
and kicked 20 feet.
Then this ostrich just takes off into the crowd,
so people are dodging it left and right,
just having no idea what's happening.
- [Henry] The Cawston Ostrich Farm closes in 1935.
- It doesn't go away
because they are endangering the public.
It goes away because the Great Depression comes along.
- [Henry] But for a brief time,
Cawston's Ostrich Farm provided the thrill of a lifetime.
- [Rutledge] You have to remember, there is no internet,
there's no TV, there's just experiences.
So when people went to this ostrich ranch, it was amazing.
It was getting to do this thing
that so few people got to do.
- Ostriches were exotic.
But at the dawn of the 1900s,
the animal causing the most chaos in America
wasn't exotic at all.
In fact, it's the one animal
Americans couldn't live without.
- [Jason] By 1900, New York City is home to 170,000 horses.
They're an essential mode of transportation,
but they have one major drawback.
- If it were possible to travel back in time,
the thing that would stun people is the stink, the smell.
- [Jason] People are flocking to New York City
thinking the streets are paved with gold.
Well, as it turns out, most of the streets aren't paved
and a lot of them are covered with manure.
- [Edward] The average horse drops between
25 and 30 pounds of manure
on the streets of New York every single day.
So that's about 25 pounds times 170,000 horses.
In a year, that's 1.5 billion pounds.
- [Adam] The Big Apple is not the only city with a
manure crisis.
A British newspaper reports that by 1950,
London, England will be buried in nine feet of dung.
And by that same metric,
New York is gonna be buried in 30 feet.
- [Jason] City street cleaners can't keep up.
And besides that, they use horse-drawn garbage wagons.
So at best, they are two steps forward and one step back.
- [Martin] Even with modern technology,
the city of New York would require
a fleet of 250 garbage trucks
just to clear all of the horse manure out of the streets
with each passing day.
- [Jason] It's so bad that those who can afford it
hire these private crossing sweepers
who can clear a poop-free path for them.
- [Martin] You think it can't get worse?
Just wait until it rains.
Rain wouldn't run off and clean the streets,
instead it would turn the streets into open sewers.
- All this sitting manure becomes a hotbed for disease.
Typhoid outbreaks are running rampant in the city.
- These flies land on the manure,
and then they go and land on your arm or your meal.
And that's how the disease spreads.
- [Jason] Typhoid fever is no joke.
Severe cases can lead to internal bleeding
and even kidney failure.
One magazine reports that horse manure
and the diseases it spreads contributes to the deaths
of 20,000 people per year.
That's enough people to fill Madison Square Garden.
- [Henry] And horse owners often leave more behind
than just their horse's waste.
- [Edward] Many of these horses are overworked.
And so if they don't last more than two years
and when they collapse, when they have a heart attack,
when they drop dead, it's quite common for the owner
to simply unhook the harness and roll away,
leaving the carcass on the street.
- [Martin] So the streets of Manhattan
were literally littered by horse corpses.
- [Jason] In 1880 alone, New York City removes
more than 15,000 dead horse carcasses.
That's more than 40 dead horses per day.
Some cities even leave the dead horse carcasses
until they start to decompose,
making it easier for them to be sawn apart and carted away.
Not only do decomposing horses
contribute to health problems,
but they're also clogging up the streets
and causing traffic jams.
- [Edward] Starting in the early 1900s,
more and more cars start hitting the streets in cities.
Cars are cleaner, they're quieter,
and they're safer than their four-legged counterparts.
- By 1912, New York City has more cars than horses,
and eventually they completely take over.
- Once cars came along, we left horses behind,
and finally left behind what they left behind.
- If you visit Yellowstone,
you might get to see a wild grizzly through your binoculars.
But there was a time
when one of those park's biggest attractions
involve those same grizzlies and a front row seat.
[whimsical music]
- [Martin] In 1872, Yellowstone in Wyoming
becomes our first national park.
After the Civil War, we wanted something beautiful
that we could all take pride in.
- It's a place of amazing natural beauty,
the hot springs, the geysers, the falls.
But it turns out to be a place
that's not really that easy to visit
and it's not getting as much attendance as was hoped.
- [Henry] Yellowstone is looking like a flop.
So in 1919, a national park service bigwig
named Horace Albright has one big idea
to breathe life into Yellowstone.
- Horace Albright decides
that the way to get crowds to Yellowstone
is to give them a show.
And the bears of Yellowstone are perfect to do just that.
[bear whining]
- [Martin] And so Albright's idea is to provide opportunities
for people to feed the bears.
So he creates feeding stations.
People drive into the park, roll down their windows,
and offer food out the window to the bears.
And the bears love it.
Even President Warren G. Harding
and President Calvin Coolidge visit Yellowstone
and feed the bears.
- [Natalia] At first this seems like a win-win situation.
Park attendants is way up,
and of course the bears are getting fed.
- [Martin] The problem is more and more garbage
is being produced within the park,
and the park administration
needs to get rid of that garbage.
And the bears will basically eat absolutely anything.
So they decide to dump all of the park's garbage
on a platform that the bears can approach.
- [Don] They have this sign that says
"Lunch Counter. For bears only."
And then they build benches.
So it creates a little stadium
that people can watch just a few feet away.
- [Henry] But everyone keeps forgetting
they're quite literally feeding a beast.
- The safety issue is quite serious.
Grizzly bears at Yellowstone reach about 700 pounds.
They're the apex predator in the park.
[bears whining]
- [Lance] In 1930, a Texas woman feeds a bear a candy bar,
and the bear says thank you by mauling her arm.
From the 1930s to the 1960s,
an average of 48 people per year
are injured by the bears at Yellowstone.
- [Don] Cars are attacked, tents are ripped open,
campers get bitten and clawed.
- [Henry] In 1967, the park is forced
to face the increasing danger
when bears killed two people at another national park,
and the last thing Yellowstone wants is a repeat.
- This is a huge wake-up call.
So the rangers begin a program
to return the bears to their natural feeding habits.
Now, instead of bear lunch counter signs,
you see signs that say "Don't feed the bears."
- [Lance] So today the park is much safer, the bears are wild
again, but it's also difficult to see a bear in Yellowstone.
- [Martin] There's a part of me that knows
that this was irresponsible stewardship
of a natural resource.
But then there's a part of me that would be like,
"Oh yeah, baby, sign me up."
I would love to have seen something like this.
- So feeding bears didn't work out all that well.
But some Americans looked at the situation and thought,
"You know what would be even better?
Fighting one."
- For most of human history, if a man was wrestling a bear,
it was not by choice, it was a matter of survival.
And then it became a form of entertainment in the 1800s.
[contemplative music]
The very first sanctioned
man versus bear wrestling match in America
took place in 1877.
Maybe you're picturing some backwoods venue,
maybe in the woods or on some farms surrounded by hay bales.
[dramatic thud]
- This was on 13th Street in Manhattan.
You could go into Manhattan and watch a bear fight a man.
[perplexed music]
- [Don] The place is a 300-seat auditorium in New York City
with a tavern on the ground floor,
- [Michele] And the man who ran the tavern actually had the idea
to set up this event as a way to sell more beer.
- [Henry] The beer-selling attraction is a success
and some unlikely stars are born.
- The funny thing
about the man versus bear wrestling matches
is that the bears are the ones who become famous.
Lena and Martin, two of the bears, go out on tour
fighting whoever will take them on.
- [Henry] Now, surprisingly, Lena's fame would dim
when she kills an opponent in 1878.
Danger be damned, the matches don't lose steam.
In fact, they gain mainstream attention.
[unsettling music]
- Gene DuBois, a Canadian wrestler, decided to buy a bear
and take it on kind of a sideshow type of experience
where he'd go to venues and he would wrestle this bear
in front of crowds.
[crowd cheering]
- [Michele] His name was Terrible Ted.
Gene DuBois took Terrible Ted around
to wrestle famous wrestlers, including Rocky Johnson,
who most people today would know better
as the father of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.
- [Henry] While all this seems like the wild olden days,
man versus bear matches are still happening in the 1980s.
- If I can get down low on him, I'm gonna take him.
I've got it in my blood, I'm gonna take him.
- They're doing this at local bars.
[crowd cheering]
Even shopping malls.
Imagine you're going into the mall just to buy some sneakers
and you see a guy wrestling a bear.
- [Crowd Member] Hit 'em in the head.
[crowd cheering]
- I remember when I was a kid
seeing highlights of Chuck Wepner.
Chuck Wepner was The Bayone Bleeder
who fought Muhammad Ali.
He inspired the "Rocky" movie.
He ended up later in his career
just wrestling bears, fighting bears.
- [Brian] In the end, these wrestling matches
go away for safety reasons.
But not for our safety, for the bear's safety.
And that's not the way you thought
that was gonna go at all.
[crowd cheering]
- One hundred years of man versus bear.
The men got mauled, the bears got famous,
and the audience, they got their money's worth.
- Modern medicine owes a lot to animals.
We use them to develop medications, test treatments,
and even practice surgeries.
But in the 1920s, a surgeon in Kansas
took that concept in a direction nobody,
and I mean nobody saw coming.
[thrilling music]
- In the 1800s, when people think of impotence,
they think of it as a depletion of sperm.
Therefore, doctors will prescribe to not masturbate
as that is a waste of your sperm
and could yield more impotence.
Furthermore, doctors will prescribe
so-called cures like opium or bleeding or quinine.
- [Henry] A doctor named John Brinkley
comes up with a more permanent solution.
- [Brian] Imagine you have a problem and you go to the
doctor, and the doctor says, "I can help you.
And the way I'm gonna do that
is by slicing open your scrotum
and putting like little nut-sized goat
testicles inside of you."
- [Steve] John Brinkley, who's supposed to be
this super sophisticated doctor
with this super star degree,
he has this procedure to sew a goat's testicle
into a man's scrotum.
[pensive music]
- [Austin] Brinkley assures his willing patient
that the goat's sex gland
will naturally bond with his organs and his blood vessels
and become a functioning part of his body.
- And so he gains a big, big following.
People beat a path through his door for this procedure.
- [Henry] There is such a demand for Dr. Brinkley's services
that he branches out.
- He thinks what's good for the goose
must be good for the gander.
So he comes up with a brilliant idea
of transplanting goat ovaries into female patients
to help them deal with their pregnancy issues.
- [Steve] People were so desperate to fix these problems.
Brinkley was charging people $750 a procedure,
which is $12,000 in today's money.
- [Henry] Despite the price,
thousands are flocking to his clinic for a cure,
and it raises suspicion at the American Medical Association.
- [Austin] Morris Fishbein, the editor
of the Journal of the American Medical Association,
soon wages a personal and medical crusade
against Dr. Brinkley as a fraud.
- Turns out that, quote, "Dr. John Brinkley"
isn't even a real doctor.
His degree is from a sham university.
Goat transplants are bad enough,
but dude isn't even a trained surgeon.
He's just out here wildin',
slicing through scrotums, ruining people's lives.
- Any success story reported by Dr. Brinkley's patients
is likely due to the placebo effect.
It's basically a mind trick.
They were not really cured but they
led themselves to believe that they had been cured.
- [Hakeem] Think about it.
Who's gonna come forward in the 1920s, or even today,
and say that their goat testicle implants
designed to treat impotency didn't work
and so now they want a refund?
No one.
- Goat and implant are two words
you do not wanna hear in the same sentence from your doctor.
But what do the words butterfly, chloroform,
and cyanide mean to you?
Believe it or not, to the kids of the 1950s,
it meant the most wholesome hobby you can imagine.
- [Natalia] In 1951, Alexander B. Klots releases this book,
"A Field Guide to the Butterflies,"
which becomes the bible for butterfly collectors
around the country.
- [Austin] America is suddenly crazy for butterflies.
Clubs spring up, schools send kids out
into fields with nets,
seeing what butterflies they come up with.
It's a huge craze and it's everywhere.
- [Natalia] The butterflies are beautiful.
But if you really wanna collect them,
[fingers snapping]
you have to kill them.
- [Austin] Butterflies are very delicate.
Their wings are paper thin.
So killing a butterfly by force will wreck your specimen.
- [Adam] Killing something without profound overt physical
damage has long met the use of one thing in particular, poison.
With cyanide being at the top of that list.
Cyanide is what they famously put in the flavor aid punch
at Jonestown to kill everybody.
- [Lance] Cyanide, for as deadly as it is, was crazy easy to get.
You can order it, mail order it,
you can get it out of a science catalog.
- [Henry] And kids can take it right out
of their own chemistry sets.
- [Natalia] Kitchen tables turn into these little science labs,
and kids set them up with their wax paper, with their pins,
and of course with their killing jar.
- [Lance] Everybody that's collecting butterflies
has their killing jar.
And you just take a standard glass jar,
you dump in a few cyanide pellets,
you screw the lid on top.
And so you have a perfect specimen every time.
No big deal.
- [Austin] It's not like people don't know
that this stuff is dangerous.
It's been proven for decades.
In 1923, a collector Martin A. Meyer was found dead
next to his killing jar.
People know this is toxic stuff,
but they're still using this chemical.
- Now, this breaks my brain a little bit
because at some point hobbyists say,
"Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
We can't give cyanide poison to children.
We need to find a safer alternative.
What chemical should we give children
to use for their hobby?"
- [Negin] Eventually they ended up substituting chloroform.
[intriguing music]
Just so you know what chloroform is,
it's that thing you see a lot in, like, spy movies
where they put it on someone, they breathe it,
and they immediately, like, collapse.
That's chloroform.
And in the 1950s, it's just kind of like
readily available to you.
- [Natalia] The movies make chloroform look like melatonin,
but it is not that.
- [Adam] In real life, chloroform creates respiratory
failure, cardiac arrest, kidney damage, liver damage,
and, oh, what's that called, death.
- [Natalia] In 1960, the Federal Hazardous Substances
Labeling Act draws a line.
Anything with a serious toxin in it
has to carry a label that says "Danger Poison."
And it's prohibited from being sold to children.
- By the 1960s, schools and clubs moved to new ways
of asphyxiating your butterflies.
Ethyl acetate jars, short freezing, carbon dioxide.
All of these new methods are way safer for the kids.
For the butterflies, though, not so much.
[quirky music]
- Cyanide on the kitchen table
right next to the peanut butter,
the '50s were somethin' else.
- There are a lot of things kids can do with a goldfish.
Feed it, watch it, name it.
Well, in 1939, a Harvard student
came up with one more, eat it.
- [Adam] It's March of 1939,
and there is a freshman at Harvard University
in Cambridge, Massachusetts
by the name of Lothrop Withington.
He tells his friends that he is going to swallow
a live goldfish.
- [Austin] His friends laugh, they don't believe him,
and they plunk down a $10 bet,
that's $200 in today's money,
saying, "No way, Lothrop, you're not gonna do this."
- And so he picks up a goldfish
and kinda wriggles it around in front of his face.
- [Adam] He holds it over his mouth.
It rides back and forth once or twice,
and then he drops it in.
Swallows it.
[speaker gulps]
- [Henry] With that one gulp,
the biggest craze since dance marathons is born.
- The craze spreads to other schools.
But now it's not just, "Can you swallow a goldfish,"
it's, "How many goldfish can you swallow?"
Just around the corner at MIT,
one student reportedly swallows 29.
At rival Ivy League Penn, they swallow 42.
The record allegedly is 89 goldfish in one sitting.
- [Henry] But as anyone who has rolled the dice
on sketchy sushi can tell you,
raw fish sometimes bites back.
- The safety issues around goldfish swallowing,
I think, are pretty clear.
- [Kavitha] Trying to quickly swallow 89 of anything,
is really not a good idea,
let alone a live goldfish that's flopping around.
It could cause you to choke if it gets stuck in your throat
or can cut off your airway if you accidentally inhale it.
So goldfish are really not meant for mass consumption.
- [Austin] Things get so bad the US Public Health Service steps
in and warns everyone.
Goldfish have tapeworms.
Tapeworms are going to give you anemia.
- [Henry] The only people who don't seem concerned
are the colleges themselves.
- [Adam] What's crazier is that some
of the goldfish swallowing events
are actually campus sanctioned.
- [Lance] It's news. They're in Life magazine.
Why wouldn't you swallow goldfish
to get into Life magazine?
So no one's putting the brakes on this.
- [Negin] In one particular case at MIT,
a hundred kids come to watch it and three policemen,
not to break it up, but to actually enjoy
the spectacle of goldfish eating.
- [Henry] But once a craze draws big crowds and the cops,
the next thing it draws is serious scrutiny.
- [Austin] In April 1939, a member of the Massachusetts
legislature introduces a bill to protect and preserve fish
from cruel and wanton consumption.
- [Henry] But what really kills goldfish swallowing is time.
Like all fans, it simply runs its course.
- [Lance] Years later, they track down Lothrop Withington,
and now he's a successful businessman
who apparently is not swallowing live animals anymore,
and he said that it was a case of mind over matter.
He didn't mind, and that fish didn't matter.
- There was a time when the scariest thing in your mailbox
wasn't your credit card bill.
It was something with actual teeth.
- [Edward] The golden age of the comic book
is the 1930s, '40s and '50s.
This is where America is introduced to superheroes
like Captain America, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman.
- One of the most iconic elements
of classic comic books of the time
are really these over-the-top ads.
You know, you can order things like X-ray specs,
whoopee cushions, and even live pets.
- [Natalia] For 1895, a company in Miami Beach, Florida
will send you a real live squirrel monkey in the mail.
- [Edward] A monkey coming through the mail
with no real instructions about its care, its food.
It says actually that they can eat anything you eat,
and also they love lollipops,
which probably don't exist in the jungles
from which they come.
- [Natalia] Most customers think they're getting a cute,
furry little creature.
They are completely unprepared for what they're getting
and what the challenges will be.
- [Jason] Squirrel monkeys require an insane level of care.
And two common squirrel monkey traits,
throwing feces and frequent masturbation.
[quirky music]
- [Henry] But still squirrel monkey fever
sweeps over the United States in the '60s and '70s.
- [Edward] As many as 173,000 squirrel monkeys
are imported from Peru and Colombia
during this time period.
- [Natalia] This would never happen today.
There are so many regulations about sending
live animals through the mail.
[monkey chittering]
- When they arrive, they're hungry, they're angry.
- You'd open the box and that monkey would jump out
and bite the first person it sees.
- [Negin] And there's just reports about,
you know, someone's aunt gettin' bitten,
a kid getting bitten, just like it's nuts.
- [Jason] It's probably no surprise that by the late '70s
the ads for live monkeys, they disappear from comic books.
I can't imagine there were too many repeat customers.
[monkey chittering]
- 173,000 monkeys made the trip through the US mail
and lived to throw feces another day.
- Imagine a petting zoo.
Now, replace every animal in it with an alligator.
Well, that's exactly what one man did,
and it went about as well as you'd expect.
- [Dan] In the early 1900s,
there are these three forms of public attractions
that are becoming huge: zoos, circuses, and amusement parks.
People are lining up like crazy for 'em.
- [Henry] That's when a man named Hubert Campbell
decides that he can get rich
by combining all three into one attraction.
- Hubert Campbell is a man on a mission.
He wants a visitor attraction
that has the feel of a nature preserve,
sort of an interactive zoo, and he hits on it.
He's gonna open an alligator park.
- This guy's an out there character.
He used to perform in the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show.
He has a lifelong passion for large reptiles,
and he's even earned the nickname Alligator Joe.
- [Jason] So he gets a business partner named Francis Earnest,
and together they decide to bring alligators
to Southern California.
They start the Los Angeles alligator farm.
- [Henry] Admission is a quarter.
And for that low price,
visitors enter a world of reptilian wonder.
- [Jason] This is not some little sideshow attraction
where there's one alligator or two, or even 20.
This is alligator nation.
- [Austin] They bring in 1,000 alligators,
who just roam freely through this barely contained park,
in the center of a residential LA neighborhood.
It's like Jurassic Park with worse fences.
- [Adam] Now, contrary to what you might be thinking,
gators are not super trainable.
But somehow Alligator Joe works his Alligator Joe magic,
and he has them doing little tricks and stunts,
including going down water slides.
- [Jason] Which is pretty remarkable
when you think some of these alligators
are like 15 feet long.
They even have shows where you can watch
some of their trainers wrestling with the alligators.
You put that on a billboard,
yeah, that's gonna get people to come.
- [Natalia] The farm even lets you handle baby alligators.
This is where Joe is really onto something.
He's creating his own lane and people love it.
- [Adam] Families can just mingle with the animals,
pose freely with no barriers between them
and one of nature's most efficient, ruthless,
and deadly predators.
- [Natalia] Parents are placing toddlers on alligators for photo
ops and other kids are riding them.
- [Brian] As a kid, I would love to see the alligators,
but I really would like a fence.
- [Natalia] The gift shop even sells baby alligators
to take home.
They tell parents, "Don't worry.
When they get too big or bity,
you can come back and trade them in for a smaller one."
It's unreal to imagine.
- [Lance] Normally when you go to the zoo,
you might get a stuffed animal as a souvenir
to remind you of the animals that you saw at the zoo.
You don't usually get to take home a live animal
to keep in your bathtub.
- [Natalia] There's also this educational angle to the
alligator farm.
You can go see, like, the eggs in incubators.
You can see them being hatched.
- [Adam] There's even sort of a gator ER
where they can see gators recovering from injuries,
which are pretty frequent
because alligators are wildly territorial.
[alligator growls]
- [Natalia] Some of those injuries were incredibly brutal.
Because when they fight,
they're taking chunks out of each other.
- [Adam] Surprisingly enough, the barriers around the park
are so shoddy that alligators are escaping.
And alligators are being found in people's pools
and backyards all the time.
- [Henry] Yet for decades, no one seems to bat an eye
at this hoard of apex predators in the middle of LA.
But eventually disaster strikes.
- [Don] In 1925, Francis Earnest's seven-year-old son
climbs into the enclosure.
One of those gators leaps up
and grabs Francis Jr. by the hand.
It takes his uncle gouging out the eyes of that gator
to finally get the mouth to open.
By some miracle, Francis Jr. survives this attack.
But no one's calling for the gator farm to be shut down.
- [Henry] Eventually, Alligator Joe's attraction
falls victim not to lawsuits or bad press,
but annoyed neighbors.
- In the 1950s, this part of LA
starts becoming more densely populated
and people have had it with the park.
They're sick of alligators roaming the neighborhood.
- [Dan] Today, alligator farms do still exist.
And you can still hold baby alligators,
but toddlers are not allowed to ride them,
and you definitely can't take one home with you.
- Looking back on our relationship with animals,
whether it was riding ostriches, wrestling bears,
or even cuddling up to a pet skunk,
sometimes we got a little too close for comfort.
But without them,
our hazardous history wouldn't be as wild.
[dramatic music fades]