S05E45 - Circus Train Wrecks 🎪🚂

⚠️Content Warning: This episode contains sustained discussion of animal injury and death, including the killing of working animals, animals shot after escaping, and graphic period newspaper accounts.⚠️

Blake and Karen discuss Circus Train Wrecks as an explanation for mysterious "real" animal sightings, as well as a source of folklore monsters of high improbability.

🚂 In This Episode

• Why circus trains wrecked so often
• The economic event that ended the era - and why regulation wasn't the answer
• An inversion of survivorship bias, and the data set nobody has built yet
• A 1917 newspaper story about lions in a butcher shop that is not what it appears to be
• The 1931 wire story about a colony of Bengal tigers in the mountains of Mexico
• How armadillos actually got to Florida
• Gypsy the elephant, Tifton to Valdosta, November 1902
• Wallace the Lion, the Exeter mail coach lioness, and Christian the Lion
• Why the Beast of Gévaudan may be the oldest "it escaped from a menagerie" case on record
• How Gévaudan subverts myths about the Enlightenment

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