A Different Nature: The Paradoxical World of Zoos and Their Uncertain Future / Edition 1 available in Paperback
A Different Nature: The Paradoxical World of Zoos and Their Uncertain Future / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0520236769
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520236769
- Pub. Date:
- 01/01/2003
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0520236769
- ISBN-13:
- 9780520236769
- Pub. Date:
- 01/01/2003
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
A Different Nature: The Paradoxical World of Zoos and Their Uncertain Future / Edition 1
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520236769 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2003 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 301 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
COLLECTIONS AS STATUS
The elephant destined to become the most famous animal in the world was captured as a youngster, probably in Ethiopia in 1861, sold to a Bavarian animal dealer, sold again to the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, then exchanged for an Indian rhinoceros and shipped to London Zoo, where he arrived on 26 June 1865, half-starved, incredibly filthy, and covered with sores (Bartlett, 1900). His name was Jumbo, and his story reveals much about the dilemmas and peculiarities of zoos, especially of their modern history.
When Jumbo reached age seven, his keepers noticed a vast increase in his appetite, and he began to grow rapidly, on his way to becoming the biggest elephant ever seen in captivity. His daily diet included two hundred pounds of hay, two bushels of oats, one bushel of sweet biscuits, fifteen loaves of bread, three quarts of onions, occasional buckets of apples, oranges, figs, nuts, cakes, and candies, and enthusiastically taken hefty swigs of whisky (Preston, 1983). By 1880 he was more than eleven feet tall at the shoulder, and he soon became a great favorite of the British nation and earned enormous publicity for the zoo. His name became descriptive of anything unusually large and remains so.
In spite of Jumbo's star status, by the time he was twenty, the authorities at London Zoo were becoming increasingly concerned by what they described as his "fits of insanity" (Preston, 1983). They assumed that these dangerous bouts of violent behavior were the result of musth, a period when male elephants are in sexual rut. More than ahundred years passed before Richard Van Gelder, the curator of mammals at the American Museum of Natural History where Jumbo's remains are held, noticed while examining Jumbo's skeleton that the elephant had impacted molars. These teeth were likely erupting at the time that Jumbo began having his fits of violence that caused panic among the authorities at London Zoo. His unnatural diet, devoid of coarse grasses, leaves, and the roughage of bark, dirt, and roots, did not allow his molars to wear sufficiently quickly, and when his fifth pair erupted, they buckled and grew inward (Van Gelder, 1991). Almost certainly the excruciating pain from this caused Jumbo's temporarily aggressive behavior at London Zoo. Alarmed at the intensity of Jumbo's fits, zoo superintendent Abraham Bartlett sought approval for the purchase of a powerful rifle, as insurance. Of further concern to Bartlett was the fact that only one keeper at the zoo, Matthew Scott, was able to handle Jumbo, even though Bartlett had appointed him as Jumbo's keeper specifically "because he had no previous experience in the treatment and management of elephants" and would therefore, Bartlett hoped, more readily "attend to instructions" (Bartlett, 1898, in Vevers's anthology of the London Zoo, 1976). Scott, however, came to be intensely disliked by the zoo authorities. He was making extra cash by giving elephant rides and pocketing the money, and he apparently gloried in being uncivil to his social superiors. With the combined problems of Jumbo and Scott on his hands, Bartlett was delighted to receive and accept an offer in 1882 from the American circus showman Phineas T. Barnum to purchase Jumbo for ten thousand dollars (then about two thousand pounds sterling).
The British nation, however, was outraged, but with a fury fueled as much by jingoism as by compassion for the elephant. The potential impact of the relocation on Jumbo's welfare was mingled with concern about Britain's loss of a popular symbol of greatness. A public fund was set up to "Save Jumbo for the Nation," and the debate even reached Parliament. The editor of the Daily Telegraph sent a telegram to Barnum, requesting that he reconsider his purchase, explaining, "All British children distressed at elephant's departure." Barnum, the man who once declared, "Talk about me, good or ill, but for God's sake talk about me!" (Brightwell, 1952), saw Jumbo only as a moneymaking machine, and fanned the fires of publicity with vigor, replying, "Fifty millions of American citizens anxiously awaiting Jumbo's arrival." Publicity about Jumbo's departure was further heightened when several Fellows of the Zoological Society filed a lawsuit against the society's council for not calling an extraordinary general meeting to approve the sale of the elephant. The legal application, however, failed. Barnum's contract with the Zoological Society prevailed, and the day arrived for Jumbo's departure from the zoo. Now a new problem emerged: Jumbo refused to enter the shipping crate. Day after day, futile attempts were made to entice, cajole, push, and drag him into the crate. There were rumors that Matthew Scott was giving the animal secret signs not to cooperate. The enormous shipping crate standing outside the elephant house for weeks became a new symbol for the nation; people began inscribing their names upon it as a mark of remembrance for Jumbo's supposedly patriotic defiance. Crowds left flowers; poems; gifts of dolls, other toys, and books; and food for the long journey. Attempts to walk Jumbo to Millwall docks, where a crane could hoist him aboard ship, had to be canceled when the elephant refused to pass through the zoo gates. Eventually Barnum came to realize that if he was going to get Jumbo he would also have to take Scott. He made a generous offer, which Scott immediately accepted, and a miracle seemed to happen that evening when Jumbo calmly walked into the crate.
The journey to the docks was a procession to match any royal funeral, some following the horse-drawn crate all the way from the zoo to make their mournful farewells. It is not surprising that Jumbo, his arrival having been preceded by so much attention, was a huge success in America. He arrived in New York on 9 April 1882, eleven feet six inches at the shoulder and weighing an estimated six and a half tons. Cheering crowds lined the streets on his journey from the docks to Madison Square. Jumbo mania hit America. Soon there were Jumbo cigars, fans, hats, jars of peanut butter, pies, and all manner of goods that benefited from being marketed as oversized. The Philadelphia Evening Star informed its fashion-conscious readers that the new shade of gray that spring was called "jumbo." No other animal's name has become so deeply embedded in our language.
Jumbo was paraded as a superstar in towns throughout the eastern seaboard; kept in the spotlight by the circus's insatiable publicity machine and traveling in his own Pullman Palace, Jumbo made a fortune for Barnum. On the night of 15 September 1885 in St. Thomas, Ontario, while being walked back to the circus train, Jumbo was hit by a runaway freight train. The train was derailed. Jumbo was dead. Barnum squeezed every bit of publicity from the tragedy. He sold the elephant's heart and bones to the highest bidders, respectively Cornell University and the American Museum of Natural History, and arranged for Jumbo's hide to be stuffed. Instructed by Barnum to show the animal "like a mountain," the young naturalist and taxidermist Carl Akeley stretched and overstuffed the elephant's skin to increase his already prodigious height by one foot.
For all his unique stature in zoo history and his extraordinary fame, in several important ways Jumbo typifies the story of too many magnificent animals in too many zoos over the centuries. Captured as a baby, his mother probably shot, sold to various institutions, never given proper care, put on display as a monstrous curiosity, reduced to a plaything to ride upon, moved from place to place, and haggled over in life and after death, Jumbo was both belittled and adored by the crowds that paid to see him. People wanted to see the massiveness of his form, yet saw too the superiority of their own kind. Awed and astonished by his size, they were also emboldened by the audacity of holding captive such a beast; humbled by his great bulk, they were yet prideful in the knowledge of human control over this giant. Jumbo's display brought out the best and the worst in people. Like many other zoo animals and like many zoos themselves, Jumbo satisfied the curiosity of all, the vanity of many, and the greed of a few.
INCONSISTENT ATTITUDES
The attitudes of humans toward wild animals seem always to have been hopelessly and perversely inconsistent. Around the world today, people adore, eat, fear, protect, worship, and, in laboratories, torture wild animals. The only constant is our inconstancy. The admiration that people have for wild animals is expressed by some in attempts to protect those animals and by others in attempts to shoot them for trophies. Some see the beauty of wild cats as a reason for keeping them alive in the wild, while it incites others to kill them for their Fur. There are abundant societies for the protection of birds, but very few people seem concerned about cruelty to fish.
The history of zoos also contains perplexing and sometimes saddening events that reflect humankind's shifting relationships with wild animals, illuminating starkly varying perceptions in different times and places. Some people regard wild animals in captivity as subdued creatures with broken spirits, while others see the same animals as venerated beings that are protected and cared for. Indeed, zoo animals are often promoted as ambassadors for their wild cousins.
Zoos, from the most awful to the world's best, expose a perpetual dichotomy, which is the reverence that humans hold for Nature while simultaneously seeking to dominate it and smother its very wildness. They reveal both the best and the worst of human nature. The desire for close contact with wild animals is counterbalanced by the lure for ownership of things that intrigue. The wish to protect rare things is offset by a need for control.
For almost their entire history, zoos have been little more than gatherings of wild animals put on display to satisfy the dull gaze of the idly curious. If it were not so commonplace, it would be recognized that taking wild animals from distant lands and diverse environments, removing them from their natural social structures and habitats, and placing them on show in a city zoo, is a manifestation of arrogance rarely carried out for good cause. Even so, a common attitude of people who work in modern zoos is that wild animals are wonderful and require help and protection. Many of them passionately want to encourage a world in which human capacity for compassion and responsibility will lead to effective protection and wise stewardship of wild things and places. They see a choice between a world in which degradation of wilderness continues at alarming rates or one that keeps safe the wild homes of wild animals. The stark differences in these options is also, however, clearly evident in the inconsistencies of zoos, in the tenderness and the cruelty that has taken place in these peculiar institutions throughout history.
THE FIRST ZOOS
A fundamental shift in our relationships with wild animals (and one that has threads leading to the very idea of keeping wild animals in captivity) unfolded within the flickering light of the Paleolithic fire circle, when the first wolf ancestor of the dog scavenged for food scraps and started an association that led to its becoming the first domesticated animal. Humans quickly learned the benefits of owning animals. The dog, for example, provided many benefits: security, amusement, and play, greater hunting success and devoted companionship that invited the sharing of affection. Humans also learned something about themselves from this new partnership: those who had canine companions were distinguished from those who did not. Wild animal ownership bestowed prestige and power.
Ownership and display of possessions have long been symbols of progress in human society, and the first collections of wild animals by the socially elite represented significant power and distinction. Thus, for much the greater portion of their history, private zoos have served principally as important symbols of prestige, especially for the nobility, speaking status like living jewels. While few peasants could afford the indulgence even of a pet rabbit, a prince could cage the strength of the tiger, subdue the speed of the cheetah. Ownership of wild animals could signify a man's power over other men as much as his dominance over the beasts.
Zoos have evolved independently in all cultures across the globe. The first appeared about forty-three hundred years ago, in the Sumerian city of Ur. Wealthy Egyptian kings maintained collections that grew to thousands of wild animals, including monkeys, wild cats, antelopes, hyenas, gazelles, ibex, and oryx. These conglomerations were the source of much pride, for they were evidence of homage proffered by subordinate neighbors who sent gifts of wild beasts as marks of special obeisance. Around thirty-five hundred years ago, Tuthmosis III assembled a miscellany of exotic wild animals as a symbol of his imperial status. These living trophies paced the gardens of the temple at Karnak. His stepmother, Queen Hatshepsut, financed expeditions to gather wild animals for her royal collection. She sent a ship to Somalia, and it returned with monkeys, cheetahs, leopards, many types of birds, and even a giraffe to add grandeur to the gardens of her private palace. Rameses II had several giraffes in his zoo, as well as lions, one of which always accompanied him onto the battlefield. Rameses IX sent gifts of monkeys, crocodiles, and a hippopotamus to Tiglath-Pileser I, king of Assyria. A large pond was built for the hippopotamus at this royal zoo, where several species of large cats were kept in pits (Strouhal, 1992).
Whereas Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures would later come to perceive humans as superior to other life forms, ancient Egyptians held a view of closer kinship, seeing themselves as members of a whole family of plants and animals, in an eternal cosmic order. Some animals came to be regarded as incarnations of gods, from which royal families and whole tribes claimed descent. Baboons and monkeys were special favorites for keeping in temples. Deification of a species, however, brought dubious honor. Used in ritualistic sacrifices, sacred ibis, falcons, and crocodiles were mummified by the hundreds of thousands in sanctified cemeteries. The temple slaughters were so great that they led to extermination of these species in many parts of Egypt.
Wen-Wang, founder of the Chou dynasty some three thousand years ago, at the beginning of the classical age of China, built a zoo as part of a very large park. It was a peaceful, sacred place called, to the delight of modern zoo professionals, the Garden of Intelligence. As kingdoms became established across Asia, the libraries, museums, botanical gardens, and zoos in court palaces served as repositories of knowledge of the known world. Sometimes court favorites also had their private zoos. The courtesan Semuramis, in the Assyrian court of twenty-nine centuries ago, kept several leopards, and her son had a large collection of lions. Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon more than two thousand years ago, also specialized in keeping lions—the king of beasts, and the beast of kings.
While these early zoos were dramatic representations of their owners' social standing, the ancient Greeks revealed a different intent and a new perspective on animals. Plutarch made the first recorded declaration against neglect and ill-use of animals. Chastising the Roman statesman Marcus Cato for his petty avarice and lack of charity, Plutarch declared: "We should not use living creatures like old shoes or pots and pans and throw them away when they are worn out or broken with service." He lauded kindness and encouraged gentleness in dealings with other creatures. The Greeks collected assortments of animals and plants not just for show but for study and enlightenment. Twenty-four centuries ago, most Greek city-states maintained extensive zoos, and visits were an integral part of the education for young scholars. One of these students, Aristotle, later established his own private menagerie, the studies from which he compiled The History of Animals, the first zoological encyclopedia. He also became the first and for many centuries the only objective writer on natural history.
Alexander the Great had been one of Aristotle's students and maintained a lifelong interest in nature. He sent numerous plants and animals back to Greece from his great eastern campaign, including a captive orangutan he found in India. It was in the city of Alexandria, founded in the year of Alexander's death, that one of his generals, whom he had appointed King Ptolemy I of Egypt, founded a zoo that became one of the wonders of its age. An indication of its size and complexity is revealed in a sumptuous procession to celebrate the Feast of Bacchus, when the zoo animals took the whole day to parade past the city stadium (Fisher, 1966). Preceded by musicians and dancers, one hundred and fifty men carried tree limbs "to which were attached wild animals of all sorts," while others carried gilded and painted cages of exotic birds, hawks, falcons, and giant snakes. There were ninety-six elephants drawing twenty-four decorated chariots, plus a dozen camels, a giraffe, and a rhinoceros. Sixty wild goats each also drew chariots bedecked with bright ribbons and bells. Seven pairs of wild asses in polished harness preceded three hundred exotic sheep, seven pairs of oryx, twenty-six white zebu, eight Ethiopian oxen, and eight pairs of ostriches, also in glittering harness. Then, heralded by festal horns and drums, came the big cats: twenty-four lions, fourteen leopards, and sixteen cheetahs as the grand finale to a magnificent parade (Loisel, 1912).
BLOODLETTING IN ROME
Jérôme Carcopino's study Daily Life in Ancient Rome shows how close contact with wild animals was a frequent occurrence for Roman citizens. Trained wild animals commonly performed in the city's bustling streets and crowded squares. Domestic and sometimes wild animals roamed many villas. Nero was just one of the many wealthy who liked to keep lions in their homes, as did Caracalla, who slept and ate with one of his favorites, Scimitar. He also took delight in introducing his pet lions at his dinner parties and found it especially humorous to release bears and lions into the bedchambers of his guests, snoring in their drunken stupors.
Most especially, however, Romans developed an unnatural appetite for lavishly funded bloodletting spectacles in the circuses. These shows included staged hunts, fights between animals, and fights between animals and people, including Christian martyrs, convicted criminals, prisoners of war, and professional gladiators. Toynbee (1973) notes that the first such show recorded in Rome was in 186 B.C., involving the slaughter of lions and leopards in a simulated hunt inside an amphitheater. Far from being disgusted, the populace clamored for more. Within less than two decades, the entertainment had increased to the point that one staged slaughter in Rome's Circus Maximus saw the death of sixty-three lions, forty bears, and an unrecorded number of elephants. Addicted to gore and sadism, the citizenry demanded ever more costly and elaborate spectacles of debauchery. The shows became so popular that people often camped overnight on the streets outside the amphitheaters to ensure the best seats.
The scale of the shows and the extent of the public killing was appalling. Titus had nine thousand wild beasts killed in A.D. 80. General Pompey financed a show featuring the slaughter of twenty elephants, six hundred lions, more than four hundred leopards, a rhinoceros, and some apes. Hadrian often had as many as a hundred lions killed in the Circus, and thirty-five hundred big animals were killed in twenty-six events staged by Augustus. Septimus Severus organized a show with an ingeniously designed ship that fell apart to expel into the arena a hundred animals, such as bears, lions, leopards, ostriches, bison, to be killed with spears, swords, and bows and arrows. This wretched event was repeated each day for a week. Trajan may have achieved the dubious honor of the greatest of these mass executions, when eleven thousand animals were killed to celebrate a military triumph. Commodus personally butchered a hundred bears, six hippos, three elephants, three rhinoceroses, a tiger, a giraffe, numerous ostriches, and uncounted lions and leopards. The record is dumbfounding.
The Emperor's Menagerie, just outside one of the main gates into the city, was partly a symbol of power, stocked as it was with exotic species from subject provinces and client kings near and far, even to the potentates of India, but also a way station for wild beasts en route to the killing grounds of the Roman amphitheaters. In a city that plumbed the depths of perversion to such an extent that Emperor Domitianus gave approval for a public play that ended each night with the torture and killing on stage of a condemned criminal (Carcopino, 1991), it is perhaps not remarkable that his brother, Emperor Titus, inaugurated the Colosseum with a gala of butchery that saw five thousand wild animals slaughtered in mock hunts or in fights to the death.
What does amaze is the stark discord between the intelligence required to build a monument so perfect in structure as the Colosseum, yet designed for such unconscionable cruelties. Toynbee (1973) notes that mosaics and painted friezes of the butchery were installed in the halls and living rooms of Roman homes. Clearly, intelligence and refinement are no guarantee for compassion or even civility (as Jennison records, 1937). Cicero seems to have been the only Roman to have ever spoken out against the madness, asking, "What pleasure can a cultivated man find in seeing a noble beast run through by a hunting spear?" It was the first and the last known public protest.
With much ingenuity the imperial architects created the impressive amphitheater of the Colosseum, large enough to house an audience of fifty thousand, for use as a public slaughterhouse. They engineered details for the spectacular shows with great technical skill. A ditch covered with metal grating, like a cattle grid, surrounded the arena, protecting the audience from the animals. The bears, elephants, rhinoceroses, tigers, water buffalo, lions, and other wild animals destined for death in these spectacles could be instantaneously launched from underground chambers into the football field-sized arena by an ingenious series of ramps, mechanical elevators, and hoists. The arena could even be flooded, to allow gladiators in boats to battle hippos, seals, and crocodiles. Giant fabric awnings could be attached to stone corbels to provide shade for spectators. The crowd often became frenzied from violent rushes of adrenaline, and as a precaution against stampedes, an elaborate system of staircases allowed evacuation in just minutes. Never was so much technical intelligence mixed in a building of such aesthetic harmony for purposes of such depravity and massacre. The spectator's eye could travel uninterruptedly from the rich blue of the Roman afternoon sky, down past the harmonious order of Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns adorning the three stories of arcades decorated with white marble statues, and come to rest on a scene of indescribable carnage in a pit of blood-saturated sand.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A DIFFERENT NATURE by David Hancocks. Copyright © 2001 by The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.