Or even a staged feeding frenzy.
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Maybe you’re familiar with the grisly tale of ravenous piranhas, Theodore Roosevelt, and one unlucky cow? If not, here are a handful of illustrated internet posts that sum it up:
This cow story also been shared by HowStuffWorks, Mental Floss, IFL Science, The Washington Post, and Smithsonian Magazine.
But here’s where you won’t find it: in any contemporary accounts of Roosevelt’s trip to the Amazon. In his book Through The Brazilian Wilderness, Roosevelt calls piranhas ferocious man-eaters and talks about hearing that a bleeding cow could be eaten alive by piranhas, and he mentions seeing half the carcass of a wounded capybara consumed by piranhas in ten minutes, but he never mentions seeing a cow skeletonized for himself. That spectacle also fails to appear in the diaries, articles, or books written by his fellow travelers, or in any newspapers at the time.
So where did it come from?
The earliest references I’ve found all come from fishmonger and publishing titan Herbert R. Axelrod. In his 1972 book Tropical Fish for Beginners, he wrote:
The Piranha, one of the most ferocious of all fishes, has an interesting background story. It all started when President Theodore Roosevelt visited Brazil and witnessed a staged slaughter of a cow by a school of piranhas. He accurately reported that the piranhas had stripped all the flesh from a mature cow in a matter of minutes. This is true! But it doesn’t often happen that way in nature. The hosts of the President had herded the piranhas into a small pool, and then they threw into this excited milling school a bleeding cow! You could do the same thing with a pack of French poodles.
I want to stop here and apologize, Reader. You probably thought the most disturbing images in this story would involve piranhas, and maybe a cow. You certainly don’t deserve this mental picture of bloodthirsty French poodles.
Four years later in 1976, in Book 4 of his Breeding Tropical Fish series, Axelrod fleshed out the story. So to speak. He ratcheted up the drama, and thankfully dropped the poodles:
How then did this fish get such a terrible reputation? It goes back to the days of our great president Theodore Roosevelt. He is, by the way, the American president I respect so much that I wish he were around to lead us now.
Anyway, Teddy Roosevelt planned an expedition to the innermost reaches of Brazil; he hoped to find new animals, fishes and geographical landmarks. Naturally he was an honored guest in Brazil; he was the first North American notable to visit the country’s jungle and all the details of his journey were prepared by the host country. Since he wanted to find something significant, his hosts led him to a huge river which he “discovered” and which eventually bore the name Rio Theodore Roosevelt, named in his honor. It is a branch of the Rio Aripuana. Being a knowing politician, Teddy had a fairly large entourage of reporters who detailed every momentous happening for the American press. The Brazilian hosts were always thinking up spectaculars for the trip, and the famous Brazilian ichthyologist Miranda-Ribeiro got the brilliant idea of taking a small segment of the Rio Theodore Roosevelt and isolating it from the rest of the river by hanging two huge nets across the river a few hundred yards apart. Then scores of local fishermen began catching piranhas with hook and line. Every one that was caught was thrown into the isolated area until several thousand piranhas had been accumulated in this netted-off section of the river.
It was then that Teddy Roosevelt was brought to this part of the river and told about the fierce man-eating fishes to be found there. “No one must dare go near the water,” for the fish would certainly eat a man down to his skeleton!!! Of course the reporters…and Teddy… were a bit skeptical about this sort of thing, but their skepticism played right into Miranda-Ribeiro’s hands. “Can you prove this claim? How do we know these piranhas are such fierce and devastating fishes as you say?” the reporters asked. So the Brazilian host took a sick old cow, which was in season, at the moment and whose main feature was that she had a heavy, bloody discharge, and they drove her into the water.
Almost immediately the starving, crazed piranhas attacked the cow, and in short order her legs were so badly bitten she fell sideways into the water where her screams and thrashing brought more piranhas onto the scene. The river was bloodied and the piranhas were so excited that they leaped out of the water onto the cow’s body to grasp a mouthful of flesh. The reporters stared in disbelief, for within a few moments the cow was brutally torn apart and devoured by thousands of these starving ten-inch long fish. The newspapers were filled with tales which, though far from being exaggerated, were lacking in the particular detail which would have made the story more honest. Teddy himself was impressed, so he took a fishing rod and caught a few piranhas using a chunk of raw meat as bait. He brought the fish back, and they were scientifically described, naturally, as Serrasalmus roosevelti, in honor of their discoverer.
Here’s the thing about Herbert R. Axelrod: he was an ichthyologist with a PhD in biostatistics who authored dozens of books and had more than twenty fish species named after him.
Here’s the other thing: he was known to make stuff up.
Signed publicity photo of Hebert R. Axelrod, available at HistoryForSale. (Note: I sometimes share affiliate links but sadly, this isn’t one of them.)
In addition to being the biggest tropical fish dealer in the United States, he was also involved in a scandal involving the massive overvaluing of a collection of rare violins he sold to the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, and he was later sentenced to 18 months in prison for tax fraud (unrelated to the violins.) This guy was an unbelievably fascinating character. (Seriously, read this Sports Illustrated article about him from 1965 called “The Strange Fish and Stranger Times of Dr. Herbert R. Axelrod.”)
We may never know the truth about where Axelrod got this fish tale, as he died in 2017 and can’t tell us, but I’m fairly confident he made the whole thing up. And not just for ad hominem reasons based on his character.
The fact is, Roosevelt never described the scene Axelrod paints so vividly. Neither did anyone on the trip, or any reporters. And speaking of reporters, there was no entourage of reporters accompanying Roosevelt down the Rio Duvida. If you’ve had the pleasure of reading Candice Millard’s River of Doubt, you’d know that Roosevelt’s death-defying journey was absolutely nothing like the scene Axelrod described.
Axelrod doesn’t know what he’s talking about here, but he seems to have pulled off something pretty impressive if he debunked a story he made up himself.
It’s time to put this udderly false story out to pasture.
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