… the MIT Press, 1989), p. 40. The Social Practice of Turtle Dinners London’s menagerists were first and foremost animal merchants purchasing and selling exotic animals as living commodities whose peculiar qualities were employed as … by caricaturists (William Dent), dramatists (Samuel Foote), and playwrights ( William Kenrick ) targeting the city’s merchants, bankers and the decline of aristocratic families. The taste for turtle flesh was such a prominent and …