For National Zoo Lovers Day: On Some Zoos and Menageries

It’s National Zoo Lovers Day by someone’s decree, so we thought it would be a good idea for a look in brevis at a topic we have touched on lightly before, the public exhibition of animals. Obviously our path in that direction began with trained animals who appeared in vaudeville, circuses, and film/TV: we’ve written nearly 100 posts on such-like. But what of the animals we simply look at? After all, tickets are sold to that sort spectacle as well. Many such creatures are intrinsically exotic; they don’t have to do anything but exist before our very eyes to provide us with thrills.

And that practice began in ancient times. By that, I don’t mean Greece and Rome (that’s Classical, not Ancient). Ancient means the Bronze Age. We’re talking thousands of years. Kings and Emperors had private collections of captured beasts from far off realms, a concept not terribly different from keeping a pet, as people still keep caged birds, or reptiles in tanks. In 1765 Emperor Francis I opened the menagerie at his palace in Vienna open to the public, and so began the widespread idea of making such exhibitions available to the public. The Menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris opened in 1794.

As with museums, the for-profit concept predates any idea of conservation or public education. People bought tickets merely to see the animals. That is the concept of the menagerie. In the U.S. there were individual exhibitions of creatures such as the elephant Old Betor “Grizzly” Adams and his bears. Early institutions such as Barnum’s American Museum had live animals on display. During the great heyday of the traveling circus, outfits like Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey traveled by rail with huge menageries in tow featuring elephants, giraffes, rhinos, hippos, tigers, lions, etc etc etc. Other more entrepreneurial impresarios of animal display included Carl Hagenback, the Bostocks of Coney Island,Clyde Beatty, and even movie producer William Selig.

But the welfare of the animals themselves, and an educated appreciation of natural science, weren’t necessarily cultivated at such institutions. Just gawkin’. The first zoological garden or “zoo” opened at Regents’ Park, London, became available to naturalists in 1828, and was opened to the public nearly 20 years later. Other notable early zoos include the ones in Berlin (1841) and Copenhagen (1859).

Well into the 20th century (and in many places, to the present day) the standard was to place animals in these zoos in restrictive enclosures, essentially jail cells for animals. It’s not really ancient history — in quite recent times, I have seen highly neurotic polar bears and elephants compulsively walking back and forth all day, plainly desperate for freedom. Increasingly animal rights activists and others have succeeded in changing public opinion to favor habitats more like the ones the animals inhabit in the wild. Some day, one hopes, that will be the universal practice. Ultimately, the ideal situation would be wilderness preserves on which people can spy on the animals without their even knowing we’re there. Were we ever to achieve that, one imagines the next legal frontier will be animal privacy!

For more on like topics, please see No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.