Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,
a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Antwerp.
My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski,
Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go.
Starting with you, James.
Okay, my fact this week is that Pope Leo X had a pet elephant who was killed when doctors gave it a gold enema.
So there's quite a lot to unpack.
It's the fact that really has everything.
It has popes, it has elephants, it has gold and it has bottoms.
So anyway, so this was in 1514 there was King Manuel I of Portugal.
He gave Leo X this white elephant called Hano and the Pope like absolutely loved this elephant.
He thought it was the greatest thing in the world.
It almost made him understand why people worshipped false idols as long as they were white elephants called Hano.
But unfortunately Hano didn't really like it living in Rome and he stopped eating and it turned out he had very severe constipation and so Leo called in all the best doctors in the land and they decided to use the normal thing that you would do for a normal human who had constipation fire some gold up the bum and unfortunately that doesn't work well with elephants.
Gold?
Is it in like in bar form or powder?
Was it coins?
Were they slotting it in?
And then you pull the trunk and hopefully you win.
So they would dilute it with water and presumably some other stuff.