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History Of Zoos And Animal Parks

Camels at Longleat

My daughter loves zoos, and as a kind of bribe to help her put up with visits to historic properties, we usually offer a trip to an animal park of some description. It's not usually necessary to look very far to find one. I do recall a time, looking at a gambolling otter, or some other cute creature, thinking "yes, yes very nice." But it was walking around a hedgehog hospital in Devon that the blindlingly obvious finally began to dawn on me; zoos are fascinating historically.

Up until the beginning of the eighteenth century nature had generally been seen in a negative light, something to be afraid of and shut out. Tudor garden design, such as it was, was all formal hedges and clear lines. This formality in garden design continued into the eighteenth century. But then early intimations of change came about when Queen Charlotte created a naturalistic Hyde Park in 1728, and Charles Hamilton created the park landscape of Painshill Park from 1738. Slowly nature became something that people idealised. Then in the nineteenth century the division between man and the rest of nature was finally demolished by a number of scientists, but most famously by Charles Darwin. Darwin demonstrated that all of life had a shared ancestry. After reading The Origin of Species in 1859, its year of publication, Thomas Hardy decided it was no longer possible to judge certain forms of life as having less worth than others. Hardy became an early opponent of cruelty to animals. In a similar way he did not dismiss certain sections of human society as having less worth than others, a widespread attitude in stratified Victorian society. The whole of Tess of the D'Urbervilles - the story of a milk maid whose humble family was once one of the country's greatest dynasties - is concerned with this theme.

Aldebaran Giant Tortoise - the world's first animal to be granted protected status

Zoos, fittingly, became very popular in nineteenth century England. Wild and exotic animals had been kept for a long time as symbols of wealth. King Shalgia of Mesopotamia founded a zoo in 2000BC. Henry the Eighth kept lions and other wild animals at the Tower of London, and James the First had a similar collection in St James's Park. But the zoo as a popular institution came into being in Victorian times. The Zoological Gardens in London's Regent's Park opened in 1828 in grounds laid out by Decimus Burton. The original collection was of four hundred and thirty animals and birds donated from the Royal Menagerie. London Zoo, therefore, serves as a link between the old type of zoo and the new. Towards the end of the nineteenth century moves began to protect wildlife generally, with the Aldebaran Giant Tortoise becoming the world's first animal to be granted protected status. A number of these huge creatures can be seen at the Cotswold's Wildlife Park in Oxfordshire.

People flocked to the new London Zoo when it opened to the public in 1847, looking at the animals as bands played on the bandstand. Thirty thousand visited in the first seven months. As A.N. Wilson noted in The Victorians the experience of looking a chimpanzee in the eye, and seeing their human-like expressions and gestures must have been something of a revelation. Amateur botany became the rage, and since 1844 people had been reading Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published anonymously, and later revealed as the work of publisher Robert Chambers. In this book Chambers introduced to a wide audience the idea that all life on Earth had a common origin, and that life had come about as a result of evolutionary laws. Scientists, Darwin included, were snooty about Vestiges, but this book prepared the ground for the publication and widespread acceptance of The Origin of Species in 1859. The same could be said of London Zoo.

Zoos then are part of the most significant historical trend of the last two hundred years, a trend which completely changed the way we look at life. Their popularity has continued to soar, and as I say we can usually find one for my daughter no matter where we are. Zoos themselves have evolved, and now often try to present the animals in as natural a setting as Wiltshire or Kent allows. In 1966 Longleat in Wiltshire became the first safari park to open outside Africa. Now Safaripark.co.uk lists thirty safari and wildlife parks in Britain. This interest in nature is of course world wide, and Steve Irwin became a major TV star in his films about Australia Zoo.

 

A Fox at the British Wildlife Centre

So zoos were part of the movement that showed that nature was all of a piece, but walking around zoo parks today, I can't help feeling that the new ecology in its laudable conservatory zeal is forgetting this basic fact. During a visit to the British Wildlife Centre near Lingfield Surrey, I listened to a talk about wild cats. Wild cats are under threat from the domestic cat, and "experts" were thinking about measures that can be taken to save them. Nothing had been done as yet since researchers were unable to accurately say what a wildcat is, so similar is it in genetic make up to the domestic cat. According to the lecturer this could mean the wild cat is already extinct. But, I wondered, couldn't this also mean the wildcat was doing very nicely thankyou eating Whiskers? It seemed that the wildcat had already saved itself, by becoming a domestic cat.

 

 

Zoos rightly make much of their conservation mission, but putting an animal in a zoo, or an animal park on the wide open plains of Wiltshire, will inevitably change what it sets out to preserve. As Steve Jones says in Almost Like a Whale: "... a zoo can sample just a tiny part of the diversity present in the wild... keepers must breed from what little they possess - which itself means evolution. They must also, perforce, choose as parents those animals best able to cope with their new environment. As a result their charges begin to change, as cows and dogs are changed." (P37) Britain is a very different place to Africa, and animals will adapt to life here. And it won't take long. Often in a stable environment, the illusion of species stability will occur. But changes in environment bring rapid developments in animal structure. The work of Peter and Rosemary Grant among finches in the Galapagos showed staggering potential for rapid adaptation among finches due to environmental change. J.B.S Haldane has suggested that some fossil records show a change in animal structure of 1% per million years. He called this amount of change 1 Darwin. The Grants found that a single drought in 1977 brought about a change of 25 000 Darwins in the Galapagos finches they were studying. ( See The Beak of the Finch by Jonathon Weiner) Of course normal rainfall the following year tended to cancel these changes out. But the potential for adaption to a sustained change was massive. Animals in wildlife parks will soon start to exploit this potential, and it won't be long before evolution does it's work in better adapting an animal to where it lives. Life isn't a set of species that can be saved as they are. In a sense that is a recreation of the old view of species as being individually created by God. Life is something indivisible, expressed through certain species for a little while. And then life changes into something else.

 

Seals at Blakeney Point, Norfolk

Perhaps the best hope for supporting wildlife is to do so in its normal environments. Some areas of natural habitat are now monitored, and even partially closed to maintain their wildlife. The National Trust, for example, owns parts of the north Norfolk coast line. The area around the end of Blakeney Point is closed off for part of the year to protect breeding seals. Boat trips are offered from Moston and Blakeney to view the seals safely. The photo here was taken from one of these boats. The seals are only placed temporally in a more traditional zoo environment if they are found sick, or if pups are abandoned. They are taken to nearby Hunstanton Sea Life Sanctuary, and if at all possible rehabilitated and released back into the sea. Perhaps Blakeney is the culmination of a process which started with small cages in Regents park, moved to the fields of Wiltshire in the 1960s, and finally to the open sea. The borders of zoos have become blurred.

 

Cotswold Wildlife Park

The thoughts that animal parks can inspire get to the heart of the modern dilemma about the natural world. And I'd like to thank my daughter, and her adopted llama Elvis for introducing me to such an important aspect of history.