Charles Mayer

Born in 1862, Charles Mayer was an American animal collector, animal tamer, and supplier for circuses and menageries. Accounts of his life say he left Binghamton, New York, as a teenager to work with the Sells Brothers Circus, and he later built his reputation around capturing and exporting wild animals for buyers in the United States and elsewhere.

Mayer spent years in what is now Malaysia and used Singapore as part of his animal-trading business. He wrote about these experiences in Trapping Wild Animals in Malay Jungles (1922), a book that attracted attention for its dramatic stories and exotic settings.

His reputation is complicated. Later scholarship noted that substantial parts of Trapping Wild Animals in Malay Jungles were plagiarized from earlier writing by G. P. Sanderson, and modern historians have also described his work as reflecting the colonial attitudes of its time. Mayer died in New York City on May 14, 1927.