Info about Zoos
The History Of Zoos
When you think of a zoo, you might think of the Fort Worth Zoo, the Dallas Zoo, the San Diego Zoo, the Philadelphia Zoo, Oregon Zoo, Houston Zoo, or Saint Louis Zoo. Zoos are a modern miracle that bring the exotic wonders of nature to an urban environment where people from all over the world can see animals from all over the world. It isn’t any wonder that the elderly, young, and middle-aged alike are attracted to zoos. It is a poor man’s Disneyworld and a rich man’s trip into nature. But how did zoos get founded? When did the idea arrive? And what are some modern variations on zoos today?
There are various terms for the zoo like a zoological garden, park, conservation park, biopark, or menagerie. Basically, animals are penned in, displayed, and may also be bred in a program to produce more animals. The term actually refers to the science of zoology, which is the study of animals. The first zoo to use the term was the London Zoological Gardens which opened its doors to the public in the mid 1800s. There are now over 1,000 zoos, and the majority of them are in cities. The term zoo was first coined in print around 1847 when it was advertised with the Clifton Zoo. Originally, the zoo concept hailed from London, and it wasn’t until the term zoological park appeared in the United States in the late 19th century in the Bronx, New York, and Washington D.C. that people became familiar with the term in America.
In the ancient world, there were concepts that predated the zoo like menagerie. From a couple thousand years ago, we find evidence of animals appearing in Egypt in a menagerie that include the hippopotamus, hartebeest, elephant, baboon, and wildcat. Chinese empresses and an emperor in the earliest Chinese period, the Zhou, had a menagerie. Even King Solomon in the Bible was an animal collector. Even Alexander the Great sent animals he found on his expeditions back to Greece to reside there for his kingdom, posterity, and himself. Even the Roman emperors kept legions of animals for private study in their arena sport.
In midieval times there were animal collectors too like Henry I of England who collected wild big cats like lions, leopards, and exotic wayfaring creatures like camels from the Middle East.
In the modern period, the first zoo to date was the Vienna Zoo in Austria, and it was opened to the public in the heat of the Enlightenment in 1765. Then, 10 years later, a zoo followed in Madrid, and 20 years later another zoo followed in Paris called the Jardin des Plantes. The London Zoo then followed suit in Regent’s Park in 1828, and it opened its door to paying visitors in 1847, re-enforcing the concept of the paid-for-entry zoo. Australia followed suit with the Melbourne Zoo in 1860. The Central Park Zoo followed in that same year, and the Philadelphia Zoo opened in 1874 because of delays because of the Civil War. In 1907, there was an innovative zoo founded by an entrepreneur that used moats to give animals a better sense of their environment, and he called it Tierpark Hagenback after his name, Carl Hagenback. During the 1970s in America, ecology emerged as a central focus in American zoological thinking, and conservation became a pivotal role that zoos were to then play from that point. The Jersey Zoo, Brookfield Zoo, and Bronx Zoo were leading the discussion on this matter and pushed the issue of conservation forward to the forefront. It was at that point that the American Zoo Association became increasingly aware of the need to promote conservation as its primary priority. Many zoos even stopped the practice of animals performing tricks for the visitors in order to promote the issue of conservation more clearly. Several trick programs were stopped because the zoos acknowledged that the trainers had probably abused the animals in order to get them to perform tricks. The Chimpanzee show and Elephant show were stopped in the Detroit Zoo, for example.
As far back as 1906 and as late as 1958, human beings were displayed in cages alongside animals to illustrate differences between those of an African sub-type, the Pygmy, and other animals, purportedly as a missing link between the white man and the Orangutan. Eventually, these practices were stopped because they were unscientific and prejudiced against certain types of people.