An appalling example of the degeneracy of the idle rich
Ben Dupont’s great great uncle.
Irénée du Pont (1876-1963) was the former president of the DuPont company, head of the family trust, and reported racist, anti-Semite, and extreme right winger. According to Gerard Colyb’s book Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain, this fine fellow built a palace in Cuba, called Xanadu, where he collected a mess of iguanas and trained them to attack:
Some of these tough, vicious lizards grew to 3 feet in length under Irénée’s loving care, and more than once the old industrialist was seen marching about with one of these ugly beasts crawling next to him on a leash. Irénée derived a peculiar kind of pleasure from these lizards. By barking a command, he could make them all come out of their pens and surround him, standing at attention. He had trained them, on another command, to attack a target to kill. It was an appalling example to the Cubans of the degeneracy of the idle rich.
The Attack-Trained Iguanas of Irenee du Pont (Weird Universe)
I have no doubt this guy did a lot of asshole things, but I’m not sure training iguanas was an egregious example. Unless he sent them marauding, or used them to intimidate for no good reason (and maybe he did). Afraid my first thought was, now that would something to see. Still, very eccentric at the least. I guess that comes from living in a stately pleasure dome.
And inbreeding. Don’t forget inbreeding.
In order to keep the money all in the family.
I’m sure it’s happened in other wealthy families. But the duPonts remain the gold standard of inbreeding.
Im sure the noted racist and anti semite trained giant iguanas to attack for totally benign reasons.
How about for protection? Or amusement. Anyway, there’s a lot of worse stuff he could do than train giant lizards, which is not to say he didn’t do any of that worse stuff. A person who does some bad things probably doesn’t do only bad things.
For protection? No, that’s putting broken glass on the walls of your estate like A I. Attack lizards has “this dude is a straight up threat” written all over it
Ya know, Nathan, you’re really defending the individual right to own freakishly big aggressive reptiles. A little sus.
How does James Bond get past the villain’s attack lizards? Luckily, he wasn’t successful with cross breeding the attack iguanas with chameleons.
If I was in serious danger I wouldn’t mind having of bunch of trained giant lizards around me — Release the reptiles! But I’d rather it not come to that.