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Whatsapp Melbourne Zoo's Queenie the elephant with ABC Radio's At the Zoo Children's Hour in 1930.



Love them or loathe them, there's a zoo in almost every big city. Although for many visitors they're just another tourist attraction, modern zoos see themselves as valuable centres of education, scientific research and conservation. Keri Phillips visits the zoo.

People have collected and kept animals—often to symbolise power—for thousands of years. During the 18th and 19th centuries, what were known as menageries, often royal collections, were turned into zoos, and ultimately opened to the public.

Although zoos had already been established in Vienna, Paris and Madrid, the London Zoo, established in 1826, marked the first step in the evolution of the modern zoo, according to Dr Nigel Rothfels, the author of Savages and Beasts; The Birth of the Modern Zoo.

Animal welfare people are much happier with naturalistic caging, but the animal rights people say it's wrong to have them in cages at all.

'It was intended as a place for the fellows of the Zoological Society to have a study collection, and it was a very private space for the fellows themselves. However, they began to realise that the fellows were constantly writing permissions for their friends and acquaintances to visit the collection, so they began to open it up to visiting days for a broader public.

'By the mid-1830s, the zoo was becoming very much a public space in Regent's Park. By the 1840s there was a carnivore terrace, essentially a series of picture frame cages for the lions and large gardens and lawns for people to picnic upon.'

'Many of its cages were barred and quite small and they didn't have much vegetation in them,' adds Dr Michael Hutchins, the director of the Bird-Smart Wind Energy campaign for the American Bird Conservancy.

'One of the major concerns of zoos at that time was that they couldn't keep animals alive very long. They didn't know very much about their biology, about their diets, about the group compositions that they should be kept in or about their reproduction. But one of the major concerns of course was disease and these smaller, sterile cages were easy to clean out.'

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Whatsapp One of the only photographs of a Quagga, a sub-species of zebra, taken at London Zoo in the mid-1800s

At the end of the 19th century, Carl Hagenbeck, perhaps one of the most unusual figures in the history of the modern zoo, had an idea that would revolutionise the way animals were displayed. As a teenager in the 1860s, he started an animal trading business in Hamburg, Germany. By the 1880s, he had become the figure in the international trade in animals, sourcing exotic animals for zoos around the world.

Around the same time, Hagenbeck began to exhibit 'exotic' people in Europe. These were exhibitions of cultures—along with the animals would come a group of indigenous people from Australia or North America. They would be exhibited in Hamburg and then travel to the major zoological gardens of Europe. In 1907 he opened a zoo of his own in the suburbs of Hamburg—Hagenbeck's Tierpark. His zoo was the first to deploy bar-less exhibits, separating animals from the public with moats.

'He set out to display animals as you would expect to see them in the wild,' explains Michael Graetz, who spent 20 years at Singapore Zoo as an architect and exhibit designer.

'Hagenbeck's zoo actually embodied many of the principles that zoos use to this day—open enclosures without barred cages. He was someone who basically came from left field. He was not a scientist, he was an entrepreneur, zoo operator and animal dealer.

'He engaged a sculptor to actually carve artificial rock out of concrete and created the first landscapes of that type, which were quite realistic and became much imitated, even though they were scorned at the beginning because their method of display and the arrangement of the animals ceased to be taxonomic. They were displayed in more or less ecological groups with layered views. You'd have predators displayed at the back of prey animals, in a kind of tableau.'

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Whatsapp Carl Hagenbeck's zoo, Tierpark Hagenbeck, was the first to use alternative methods of separating animals instead of fences

Hagenbeck's ideas would become increasingly influential and led to a reinvention of zoo design in the second half of the 20th century. During the 1970s, Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle opened what is generally considered the first immersion exhibit under the direction of the architect David Hancocks. Michael Hutchins worked at Woodland Park in the 1970s and '80s.

'What was happening at that time was there was a great interest in the ethology and social biology of animals, and there were lots of field studies being done into animals and their ecology and behaviour.

'The idea was to use that knowledge to design new exhibits that were much more appropriate for the animals and allowed them to express as large a percentage of their behaviour as they would in the wild. There was much more extensive vegetation, the exhibits started to become larger, more complex.'

'You started to see the development in the 1990s of something called environmental enrichment. For instance, primates were fed by spreading seeds in the grass and they would pick through them, just as they would in nature, and it gave them something to do. There wasn't the sterility and boredom of previous older exhibits. The enclosure sizes allowed for larger, more naturalistic social groups for animals that lived in social situations.'

Woodland Park Zoo became noted for something called the immersion exhibit. At Hagenbeck's Animal Park, people stood on one side of a moat, looking into an exhibit where animals were apparently living in the wild. The immersion exhibit was the next step in the evolution of zoo design and the intention was to make the visitor feel part of the animal's environment.

'Key elements of this had to do with trying to bring down the amount of other people that you saw,' says Rothfels. 'At Woodland Park they devised winding paths to make sure that in any given view you were less likely to see other people, and they developed ways where the exhibit somehow came out into the space that the visitors were in themselves. That's the key element of Woodland Park and it became phenomenally successful.'

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Whatsapp Bear exhibit at Woodland Park Zoo

Along with the evolution of exhibit design came new ideas about the purpose of zoos and our relationship to the animals in them. While the role of zoos still included recreation, science and education, a fourth function was added—conservation.

'I think this concern for naturalism in zoo exhibits was sucked up into a larger concern for ecology and conservation,' says Professor Ben Minteer, an environmental ethicist and conservation scholar at Arizona State University.

'There was also pressure for improvements in animal welfare and the wellbeing of animals in captivity—or "managed care" as the zoo community likes to call it—was also increasingly on the agenda of the zoo community, and certainly part of a growing public ethic regarding zoo animals and wildlife and conservation more generally.'

Philosopher Bryan Norton is an editor of Ethics on the Ark: Zoos, Wildlife Conservation, and Animal Welfare. He says that there's a distinction to be made between those concerned for animal welfare and those who argue for animal rights.

'Animal rights seems to be a much stronger concept than animal welfare. But both can lead people to say that it's unfair to keep wild animals in cages. When people say, "I hate to see animals in cages," one comeback was, "Okay, we'll give them naturalistic sites."

'For example, here in Atlanta, the Ford Foundation provided money to make a gorilla exhibit, and you really could think that you were in the jungle when you look into that. But it's also true that these animals are still not free and wild, so that debate goes on. Animal welfare people are much happier with naturalistic caging, but the animal rights people say it's wrong to have them in cages at all.'

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Whatsapp A lion pictured at 'The Zoo' formerly in Moore Park, Sydney in the 1890s

Most animals in zoos these days are born and bred in zoos, rather than captured in the wild. Ben Minteer argues that the role modern zoos play in conservation balances the issues associated with keeping animals in captivity.

'What often happens with the ethical discussion of zoos is that it can polarise those who think the priorities should be on animal rights or animal welfare, or on conservation. The community tends to be much more accepting of zoos and having these animals in exhibits as ambassadors for their species that are threatened in the wild—the educational component and also just the sheer wonder of seeing those animals up close and personal.

'Many also support the role that zoos can play in captive or conservation breeding and reintroduction; in assisting in research, sharing knowledge and sharing resources with conservation organisations; and supporting community groups that are engaged in conservation.'

For opponents of zoos, their role in conservation doesn't justify keeping animals in captivity.

'PETA doesn't believe that animals are ours to use for entertainment,' says Claire Fryer, the campaign co-ordinator for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Australia.

'All animals in zoos are denied everything that is natural and important to them. Every aspect of their lives is manipulated and controlled, they are told what they will eat, when they will eat, when they can sleep, who they can mate with. The breeding programs are under the guise of species preservation, but inevitably they result in a surplus of the less cute adult animals, which are routinely traded, loaned, sold or put down when they are no longer wanted.

'And of course most animals that are housed in zoos are not endangered. Those that are will very likely never be released into natural habitats. Returning captive bred animals to the wild is in most cases impossible because these animals have been denied the opportunity to learn survival skills. Often they have no natural habitat left to return to because of human encroachment.

'If zoos really cared about conservation, they'd put their resources behind habitat protection and anti-poaching efforts. What we need to do is stop breeding these animals and work on conserving the species in the wild.'

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Whatsapp Adelaide Zoo's female panda Funi. The zoo is helping to save the panda by participating in a breeding program

Arizona State University's Ben Minteer says that the public has little idea about the reality of running a zoo.

'We want zoos to be Disneyland. We want zoos to be these bucolic, peaceful, beautiful, deathless environments. I'm not sure the public really understands the backstage reality of managing animal populations in zoos and I think there's a sense of wanting it both ways, of wanting zoos to be very natural, very real.

'Of course the flip side of that is that if you are going to do those things, death, disease, sickness is part of that equation, and so if you are going to really represent that in a zoo you are going to have a very different kind of experience for zoo-goers than what most of us are used to.'

It must be said that today there's an enormous gap between the worst and the best zoos, between aquariums that still, for example, display killer whales and dolphins, and zoos like the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, which focuses exclusively on the interpretation of the natural history, plants and animals of its region, the Sonoran Desert. And, despite the occasional bad press, zoos remain a popular form of entertainment and recreation.

'For as long as people have been around they've been capturing animals and keeping them in captivity,' says author Nigel Rothfels. 'It seems to me that we are almost hardwired to desire to have this kind of close engagement with animals. Wildlife documentaries do an amazing job of filling an hour with animals all over the place but when people go to the actual "wild", they struggle because they don't actually see animals at every turn.

'They go to the nature, they don't find it, but they go to the zoo and there are animals everywhere. I think that zoos are filling a kind of need that people have.'

Zoos Listen to this episode of Rear Vision.

Rear Vision puts contemporary events in their historical context, answering the question, ‘How did it come to this?’