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)
image (cropped): Patricia Guillory (CC BY-SA 4.0)
