The Rise of the Modern Zoo: Reading Answers & Explanations

“Long before anyone thought of a zoo as a place of study, rulers kept animals to be looked at.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Zoos in Rome, Detroit and elsewhere copied both the moats and the argument within two decades.”

“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.”