The death of a single rat was news in The New York Times on Jan. 26.  Some readers may have felt that they were getting a little more rat information than they really needed. But this was a special creature — this Rose was — having just made her Broadway debut.  The Times has always had a soft spot for animal show celebrities, especially those that perish tragically.  Take the case of Jumbo, the elephant whose name became a byword for the colossal. The Times devoted two-and-a-half columns of space on the front page to Jumbo’s arrival in New York in 1882, after the showman P. T. Barnum and his partners in the Barnum, Bailey & Hutchinson circus purchased him from the Zoological Gardens in London.  Jumbo was killed Sept. 15, 1885, while on tour. He and the little elephant Tom Thumb were hit by a locomotive as the circus train was loading at a rail yard in St. Thomas, Ontario.  “The noble animal started on a run down the track, with its keeper bravely running by its side,” The Times reported. “But it was of no use. The train could not be stopped, and as it came thundering along it first struck the clown elephant, throwing him into the ditch, and then dashed into Jumbo. As the locomotive struck the mighty monster it was as if two trains had come together.”  Our first-day account was remarkably straightforward, filled with compelling (but not gruesome) detail and relatively free of anthropomorphism.  That wasn’t the case a year later, when Barnum — not a man to let death inhibit promotional possibilities — imported Jumbo’s “grief-stricken widow,” Alice, from the Zoological Gardens.  “When Jumbo met his tragic death the news was not conveyed to Alice,” The Times said. “She continued to sway her trunk and bemoan her fate in her little brick house in the Royal Zoological Gardens. Barnum then thought of her widowhood and her wretched state of mind, and declared that she must be brought to this country, where she might be near the remains of her once loved husband.”  The couple was calfless. By this time, Jumbo had met his rendezvous with taxidermy.  On the night of her arrival in New York aboard the Egyptian Monarch steamship, the female elephant was led up to the old Madison Square Garden, on Madison Square.  “When Alice first saw the stuffed skin of Jumbo, she seemed like one in a trance,” The Times said. “Then she touched his skin with her trunk and again burst into a flood of tears. She knew at last that he was dead, and as she looked into his glassy eyes and fondled his stuffed forehead with her trunk, she seemed to say: ‘My poor old Jumbo, your Alice weeps for you.’”
The death of Jumbo the elephant in 1885 and the arrival the following year of his “widow,” Alice, inspired some mammoth stories in The Times.