Imagine: you’re famous. Like, crowned head, pope or Hollywood megastar famous. Who can you trust? Everyone is out for what they can get and liable to betray you at any moment. Everyone except your pets, who, yes, are also out for what they can get, but can’t call the tabloids. Rather a bite in the face than a stab in the back, which is perhaps why, historically, so many big stars have preferred to derive emotional support from furry (or occasionally scaly) things.
Where did it start? In the age of discovery, European royal courts started filling up with poor creatures who had no business being there, from monkeys dressed in human finery to parrots casually handed out as diplomatic gifts. Juan of Austria had a lion (imaginatively called Austria), Philip II of Spain had “lions, bears, rhinoceros, elephants and civet cats”, while Pope Leo X had an elephant too, Hanno, whose skeleton was rediscovered by puzzled heating engineers in a Vatican courtyard in 1962. Hanno was a gift from Manuel I of Portugal, who also staged a fight between a rhino and a (different) elephant (the elephant ran away and the rhino was declared victor), which is some next-level capricious monarch stuff.
