DR. DOLITTLE OF BROOKLYN HEIGHTS (1910)
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The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations.
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All neighborhoods have their odd birds.
In the early part of the 20th century, Brooklyn Heights had Harold S. Burnett.
Burnett, known throughout Brooklyn as a keeper and handler of exotic animals, birds, and reptiles, was often in the newspapers, either because of his escapades with his animals, or because of the other one involving the divorce of his wife.
And Burnett had quite the collection of animals – from boa constrictors, to lizards, to game cocks, to fighting dogs and bucking broncos. There didn’t seem to be an animal that Burnett would not consider handling.
THE DAY THE BEAR APPEARED
One day, Burnett confessed to a friend his desire to own a bear.
So, when that friend returned from a hunting trip, he sent a bruin to Burnett as a gift.
“He lives in Flatbush and bagged it on a hunting trip,” Burnett explained how he came by the animal. “But the bear was so large they had to take the doors off the hinges to get it in the back yard and it was such a fierce brute that I couldn’t let it get out of its cage.”
“SO I DECIDED TO HAVE IT SHOT.”
At some point after having the animal in his backyard for short period, Burnett decided that it was, indeed, too large to have as a household pet and “entirely too dangerous to be permitted to frisk at will about the streets.”
Burnett, thus, decided to have the bear shot. So on a Friday night in March of 1910, with a special policeman, a veterinary surgeon, and a couple of reporters on hand (because Burnett was nothing if he was not a self-promoter), the deed was planned.
At 7:30 that night, Burnett had a searchlight directed onto the bear cage, so as to give the special policeman a “good light to shoot by.” The bear, though, seemed to know that the jig was up and began squirming within the cage, moving “its vulnerable points out of range.”
Someone, the paper noted, remembered that bears liked sugar and so they plied the poor creature with several lumps of it. Then, while the bear was “licking its chops complacently” from its sugary meal, the end came.
The special policeman “fired the fatal shot.”
Burnett’s domestic troubles, it was noted, were also caused by his love of animals – specifically, reptiles. His young wife complained she was always “running across such things in the bureau drawers and other unexpected places and it got on her nerves.”
Indeed.
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