Dead Animals

John Copcot of The Queen’s College, Oxford, was wandering through Shotover Woods one fifteenth-century day when he heard a strange rustling in the undergrowth. He swung round and was horrified to behold a wild boar hurtling towards him. Armed only with a leatherbound volume of Aristotle (or was it Thucydides? legends vary) the quick-thinking student thrust it into the gaping jaws of his tusked assailant with a cry of Graecum Est!* – whereupon the slobbering beast fell down dead.

In due course Copcot returned to his college, boar carcass triumphantly in tow. The animal was slowly cooked and quickly devoured by his appreciative fellow students. Thus was a tradition born. To this day, over 500 years later, a Christmas feast is held each year at Queen’s during which a boar’s head on a silver platter is paraded into the dining hall as the centrepiece of the college’s Yuletide celebrations. Instead of an edifying tome, however, it has a decorous orange in its mouth.

There aren’t many wild animals in Oxford any more – though there are still a few dead bores. Closed is the Big Game Museum which once stood on the Woodstock Road. Gone too is the zoo in Kidlington where, for a brief period (1931-36) awestruck visitors could gaze upon an elephant, a lion, a giraffe, camels, kangaroos, jackals, llamas, a family of five baboons, a grizzly bear, a stork, and a guinea pig – all for an entrance fee of sixpence.

The problem was that the zoo also housed three wolves who, one night, managed to break out through a gap in the perimeter fence. Two were quickly recaptured, but a lone lupus remained at large for three days, striking terror into the neighbourhood. Eventually it was tracked down and terminated by an intrepid Oxford Mail photographer armed with a rifle as well as a camera. ‘My best shot,’ as he memorably put it.

Our city’s association with animals is deep and ancient. After all, it takes its very name from a beast. Its coat of arms features an elephant, a lion and a beaver as well as the eponymous ox.

And every college in the University seems to have its own distinctive animal association:

All Souls and mallards
Brasenose and crocodiles
Corpus Christi and tortoises
Hertford and harts
Magdalen and deer
St John’s and peacocks
Worcester and swans

That’s even before you consider animals in other contexts: in pre-history (dinosaurs and ammonites) in mythology (dragons and unicorns) in heraldry (martlets and gryphons) in literature (cheshire cats and white rabbits) in art (Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest is perhaps the most famous painting in the Ashmolean) in statuary, and in sculpture (including our favourite: the Revd Graham Midgley, Chaplain of St Edmund Hall in the late 1960s, and his beloved labrador Fred, both wearing dog collars.)

A stunning new stained glass window has recently been installed in Christ Church Cathedral (the first for over a century). It depicts St Francis of Assisi surrounded by all creatures great and small. And if you venture into Worcester College Chapel you will be rewarded by a veritable menagerie, for each pew houses a different, beautifully carved, exotic animal: from emu to walrus, from camel to whale.

As if all this isn’t enough, Oxford also boasts the UK’s most famous flying Shark …

… and the world’s most celebrated ex-animal. Better known even than Monty Python’s Norwegian Blue parrot. So famous in fact that it gives its name to an unforgettable alliterative simile:

‘Dead as a Dodo’

Recognised for ever by its memorable name, immortalized in world literature by Lewis Carroll, accorded its own display cabinet, and stared at in wonderment by hordes of visitors to Oxford’s Natural History Museum, the Dodo’s greatest distinction … is its extinction.

*Graecum Est! – The literal translation is: ‘It’s Greek’.
The colloquial rendition might be something like –‘Take that, if you like a bit of Greek!’