The Rise of the Modern Zoo

A Long before anyone thought of a zoo as a place of study, rulers kept animals to be looked at. Egyptian queens imported baboons and giraffes; Chinese emperors maintained parks stocked with deer and birds; and in Tenochtitlan the Aztec ruler Montezuma kept an enormous collection of birds, cats and reptiles, staffed by hundreds of keepers, which astonished the Spanish soldiers who saw it. The most influential of these menageries was the one Louis XIV built at Versailles in the 1660s. Its enclosures were arranged around a central pavilion so that guests standing in one spot could see every animal at once, an arrangement designed to display the reach of the king rather than the habits of the creatures. Animals were ornaments of rank, and no one expected to learn much from them.

B The modern institution began with a different motive. The Zoological Society of London was founded in 1826 by men who wanted a living collection for scientific study, and the gardens it opened in Regent's Park two years later were restricted to fellows of the society and their guests. Money, not principle, changed that: to cover its costs the society admitted the paying public in 1847, and the abbreviation that visitors used for the zoological gardens gave English the word zoo. The animals lived in barred cages with tiled floors, each species alone, in buildings designed above all to be easy to scrub. Hygiene was taken seriously, but the design ignored almost everything else an animal might need, and mortality among the more delicate species was severe.

C The break came from a dealer rather than a scientist. Carl Hagenbeck, who supplied animals to zoos across Europe from his yard in Hamburg, patented in 1896 a way of displaying them without bars: a dry ditch, invisible from the visitor's side, kept the public and the animals apart while allowing both to be seen against the same background. At his new park outside Hamburg, opened in 1907, lions appeared to share a rocky panorama with grazing antelope standing safely on the far side of a moat. Hagenbeck also insisted that many species tolerated cold far better than the heated houses of the day assumed, and kept them outdoors year round. Zoos in Rome, Detroit and elsewhere copied both the moats and the argument within two decades.

D A further change of purpose came in the twentieth century, as species began disappearing faster than collectors could replace them. Some animals survived only because they were already in captivity: Père David's deer, extinct in China, persisted in an English park and was eventually returned to its own country, and the Arabian oryx, hunted out of the wild by 1972, was bred in captivity and released back into Oman a decade later. Studbooks recording the ancestry of every captive individual, first compiled for the European bison, allowed zoos to plan breeding across national borders instead of competing for specimens. Gerald Durrell, who founded a zoo on Jersey in 1959, argued the case most bluntly: a zoo, he said, should be a reservoir for species in danger, and everything else it did was secondary.

E Welfare took longer to enter the conversation. The Swiss biologist Heini Hediger, who ran the zoos of Basel and Zurich, argued in the 1950s that an enclosure had to be judged by how an animal used space rather than by its area alone: every species had a distance at which it would flee an approaching human, and a boundary it defended, and a design that ignored these produced permanent stress in a technically spacious pen. Later observers catalogued the repetitive pacing, rocking and head-swinging that appear in captive carnivores and elephants and rarely in wild ones. The response has been enrichment, giving animals problems to solve and choices to make, together with far larger enclosures, and a number of zoos have concluded that elephants and polar bears cannot be kept acceptably at all and have stopped.

F What zoos are now for remains disputed. They claim to educate, though studies of what visitors actually remember an hour after leaving give mixed and sometimes disappointing results. They fund fieldwork, though the share of ticket revenue that reaches wild populations is small. They breed threatened animals, though only a minority of the species they keep are part of any release programme. The honest answer is probably that a zoo does several things unevenly, and that the version most likely to survive public opinion is a smaller one: fewer species, far more room for each, and a greater share of attention given to the frogs, insects and songbirds disappearing within a few kilometres of the gate rather than to the largest animals from the furthest away.