Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo

"In the last 20 years or so, there have been several histories of individual zoos. There are great accounts of the London Zoo, the Bristol Zoo, the Tokyo Zoo, and the oldest zoo in America: the Philadelphia Zoo. Zoos are wonderful focuses for this type of work because they’re distinctive and characteristic of the cultures they’re embedded in. Even though zoos exist all over the world, by no means are they the same. And metropolitan zoos keep great records. This history focuses on Germany’s Hamburg Zoo. I chose it, in part, because it moves the focus away from the Anglophone world. But more importantly I chose it because the founder of the zoo, Carl Hagenbeck, largely set the pattern for 20th-century zoos. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He was also a major international animal dealer. He shipped animals to collectors all over the word. But he’s best known for replacing confined cages and enclosures with more natural, or at least larger, enclosures and environments for the animals. If you think of the trajectory of zoos as going from something more like a sideshow or menagerie, with animals in little cages, to what the San Diego Wild Animal Park is like, Hagenbeck is a big way station on that path. Every zookeeper understood that zoos were not good habitats for animals in their nineteenth-century version. For every specimen that ended up in a zoo, many animals were killed in the effort to capture them, or died on the journey back. When you got one live animal, there were probably eight, ten, or fifteen dead ones on the way. Zoo husbandry was not particularly good; animals didn’t tend to live long. But it would be anachronistic to think that Hagenback or his contemporaries shared our awareness of the looming risk of extinction. That began to emerge in the late nineteenth century. Of course, long before that, people realised what had happened to the dodo, and several other species with small populations and restricted ranges. But the disappearance—or near disappearance—of massive populations like the bison in the US (which didn’t entirely disappear) and the passenger pigeon (which did) came as a shock and, belatedly, an epiphany. Conservation and preservation of species did not become part of the mainstream agenda of zoos until the second half of the 20th century."