The man who ate EVERYTHING!

Rhino pie? Surprisingly tasty. Sea slug? Palatable if boiled. But roast mole? Yuk! Meet the Victorian naturalist with a wild plan to feed the world

THE MAN WHO ATE THE ZOO by Richard Girling (Chatto £17.99)

WE LIVE in an ignorant century, when know nothing masquerades as know-all and the vast encyclopedia of knowledge on the internet is selectively pillaged to confirm and validate prejudice; to close minds rather than open them.

It is a joy, then, to be transported back to an era when inquiry was pursued for its own sake, and to see the world through the wide-open eyes and the fertile brain of one of the most inquisitive human beings of modern times.

You may never have heard of Frank Buckland. I hadn’t. But it was a delight to be introduced to this largely forgotten polymath of that great age of scientific discovery, the 19th century.

He was born in 1826 in oxford, son of a geology professor there. Darwin, Faraday, Brunel and Stephenson were family friends. But even in this august company, Frank’s curiosity and phenomenal brain power marked him out from an early age.

His mother Mary noted (with a weary sigh, one imagines) that at three years old ‘there is no end to his questions. He is always wanting to see how everything is made. He is never happy unless he sees the relation between cause and effects.’

By four, this prodigy was identifying dinosaur fossils at a glance.

HE LoVED animals with a passion and had a menagerie of snakes, slow-worms, frogs and ducklings stuffed in his pocket, studying their habits, making notes, drawing conclusions. At home, dozens of guinea pigs and rats scuttled around his feet.

As he got older, his pet collection became increasingly eccentric. There was a tame bear that followed him everywhere, a grinning monkey named Jenny he carried around in a blue bag, a jackal and a rapacious eagle that had to have corks from wine bottles put on its talons to stop it from ripping him apart.

But what he adored even more about animals was cutting them up once they had shuffled off this mortal coil.

From an early age, he worked his way, with scalpels and tweezers, through cats, dogs, owls, hedgehogs, rabbits — anything he could lay his hands on.

If it had once moved, he dissected it. How else could he discover how joints, muscles and ligaments actually worked?

It was a short onward step to sampling their flesh. Field mouse was best roasted; snake excellent.

He’d been encouraged into daring diets like this by his equally eccentric and experimental father, who travelled for his work and brought back ‘treats’ from abroad for the family dinner table, such as potted ostrich and bear steaks. To further satisfy his curiosity, Buckland senior raided the university anatomy department for slices of crocodile and turtle, while their own back garden yielded mice baked in batter and mole (the yukkiest of all, apparently).

There was method in the madness, and in later life this became Frank’s personal crusade, too — to taste all sorts of animal meat in the hope of finding a new source of food for mankind.

Nature, he argued, blessed this planet with some 140,000 species of animals, yet only 43 regularly saw the inside of a cooking pot. Surely more were edible? What was wrong with eland or wombat?

As a result, zoos sent him off-cuts from dead animals to try. He experimented (or, rather, his poor cook did) with rhinoceros pie, elephant-trunk soup, roasted giraffe neck (after two of them died in a fire at regent’s Park Zoo), panther chops, bison steaks and kangaroo stew.

They were all surprisingly palatable. Boa constrictor tasted like veal. Sea slug was oK if soaked for a day and boiled for a night.

At a fashionable dinner for his high society friends — his social circle encompassed

bishops, lords and even the Prince of Wales — he served up Syrian pig, Canadian goose and Honduras turkey.

He moved house to the edge of Regent’s Park, ‘within a lion’s roar of the zoo’, to quote author Richard Girling. ‘If a camel sneezed or a rhinoceros complained of toothache, then he could be there in minutes.’ When an old lion died, he was quickly in situ to pull back the skins from its paw and fiddle with the tendons to see how they operated.

What was astonishing about Buckland was his range of professional expertise. He was a zoologist, an anatomist, a trained surgeon, an Army doctor. His analytical skills rivalled those of Sherlock Holmes as he followed up clues. He was also a pure‑water specialist who ran a campaign to clean up rivers and virtually single‑handedly saved the salmon in Britain.

He was constantly on the go. Reports of a whale stranded on a beach in Lancashire would have him immediately on the train north, to examine the car‑ cass and cut off a slice for examination. Or to the Kent coast where a fisherman had hauled in a rare stingray in his net.

Everything he came across was an experiment to be attempted. It was he who recommended that Captain Matthew Webb cover himself in porpoise grease to ward off the cold during the first successful swim across the English Channel in 1875.

The science always came first, how‑ ever macabre the circumstances. When his own much‑loved father died, he cut the head off the corpse and sur‑ gically removed the first five vertebrae of his backbone to diagnose that they were diseased and had probably caused his death. He then labelled and left them to the museum at the Royal College of Surgeons.

But what set him apart from many of his contemporary scientists was that he didn’t confine his knowledge and enthusiasm to an academic elite but burst out from the confines of the ivory tower and onto the pub‑ lic stage. He was a populiser of sci‑ ence, a Victorian David Attenbor‑ ough or Brian Cox,

A prolific author, he rattled out countless articles for magazines and wrote dozens of best‑selling books under the heading of Curiosities Of Natural Histories, graphically covering everything from a lobster’s sense of smell to cannibalism among rats.

His public lectures were huge sell‑outs, spectacles of flamboyant showmanship. He was plain‑speaking, down‑to‑earth, funny, daring, contro‑ versial. He used props, gimmicks, anecdotes, whatever was necessary to get over his message of perpetual inquiry in search of the truth.

THE academic establish‑ ment dismissed him as a gadfly and a vulgarian, and was outraged by his fasci‑ nation for the bizarre. Like many Victorians he was drawn to freak shows — giants and midgets, the original Siamese twins, Christine and Millie McCoy, all exhibited for people to gawp at. Buckland didn’t see it that way. They were all part of Nature’s rich tapestry, whose diversity never ceased to amaze him.

Girling writes: ‘He never quite grew up, the boy within him never hushed. He never lost the capacity for wonder. Everything he saw or heard would contain something to fascinate him and compel him to look for answers.’

As for his culinary quest to feed the world, it sadly came to nothing. He concluded that the best source of sus‑ tenance was staring everyone in the face — horses, in their millions throughout Victorian Britain.

But a trial public dinner to promote the idea among the country’s intellec‑ tual elite flopped. Noses were turned up. Here was something that Brits just wouldn’t swallow.

Ever inventive and imaginative, Buckland’s conclusion was that horse‑ meat should, therefore, be standard fare in prisons, as a sure‑fire way of deterring crime.

And even on his deathbed in 1880, just 54 years old and worn out by all his exertions, this Peter Pan found plenty to look forward to: ‘I am going on a long journey where I think I shall see a great many curious animals. This journey I must go alone.’