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Thomas Jefferson’s Manic Quest to Prove America Has Big Animals
Or, why the writer of the Declaration mailed a rotting moose to France
One of the stereotypes of the United States is that everything is larger here. Like it or not, we have bigger cars, bigger meals, bigger houses, and bigger egos. This has been a feature of American society for a long time — at least since the 1780s when Thomas Jefferson went on a slightly unhinged campaign to prove that our animals were bigger than Europe’s.
It all started with the French, who have delighted in puncturing our big egos for as long as the United States has existed. In the late 1700s, it became fashionable among French scientists to claim that America was “degenerate.” They believed that America was a newer continent, having recently emerged from the sea. Because of this, they believed, America was too swampy. It wasn’t an environment that could sustain impressive plants and animals. French scientists like Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon, theorized that animals and plants would “shrink and diminish under a niggardly sky and unprolific land” in the United States.
These Frenchmen found confirmation of their theory in the fact that North America did not have big animals like those found on other continents. Where were the elephants, giraffes, and…
