Jacco Macacco was a fighting ape or monkey who was exhibited in monkey-baiting matches at the Westminster Pit in London in the early 1820s. He achieved some measure of fame among the sporting community through his reputed prodigious record of victories against dogs, but was brought to wider attention by depiction in popular literature, artworks and by citation in speeches to Parliament by the animal welfare campaigner Richard Martin. Jacco's most famous fight, against the equally well-known bitch Puss, seems to have marked the end of his career: he may have died as a result of injuries received during the match or of an unrelated illness sometime afterwards. His ashes are claimed to be housed at the True Crime Museum in Hastings, East Sussex. History Most details on Jacco come from second-hand or fictionalized accounts. In Pictures of Sporting Life and Character (1860), William Pitt Lennox gives a detailed account of Jacco's career: he was landed at Portsmouth where he fought dogs in a number of local sporting arenas before being purchased by a London sporting impresario and transported to Hoxton from where he continued his career, fighting in the Chick Lane and Tottenham Court Road pits, and earned one of his monikers as the "Hoxton Ape". Lennox writes that after biting his owner he was sold to the proprietor of the Westminster Pit, Charles Aistrop. Although he was already somewhat famous, at the Westminster Pit Jacco's fights began to attract spectators from the higher reaches of society and considerable wagers were placed on his fights. Aistrop gave a somewhat different account of Jacco's history. In a statement published in 1825 he claimed that Jacco had belonged to a sailor who had kept him for three years. Jacco had always been very calm but one day suddenly became aggressive over a saucer of milk and lacerated three of the sailor's fingers. The sailor had sold him to a silversmith called Carter from Hoxton. Carter had taught Jacco many tricks, but because the ape was extremely aggressive Carter had to purchase a large sheet of iron to use as a shield whenever he approached him. Carter finally tired of Jacco's constant attempts to attack him and took the ape into a nearby field where he set a dog on him. Jacco defeated both this dog and a second dog, and was then matched against a dog bred for fighting at Bethnal