Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo
Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo Books
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To modern sensibilities, nineteenth-century zoos often seem to be unnatural places where animals led miserable lives in cramped, wrought-iron cages. Today zoo animals, in at least the better zoos, wander in open chairs that resemble natural habitats and are enclosed, not by bars, but by moats, cliffs, and other landscape features. In Savages and Beasts, Nigel Rothfels traces the origins of the modern zoo to the efforts of the German animal entrepreneur Carl Hagenbeck.
By the late nineteenth century, Hagenbeck had emerged as the world’s undisputed chief in the capture and transport of exotic animals. His business included procuring and exhibiting indigenous peoples in highly profitable spectacles throughout Europe and training exotic animals — humanely, Hagenbeck advertised — for circuses nearly the world. When in 1907 the Hagenbeck Animal Park opened in a village near Hamburg, Germany, Hagenbeck brought together all his business interests in a revolutionary zoological park. He went wild animals out of their cages and into “natural landscapes” alongside “primitive” peoples from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the islands of the Pacific. Hagenbeck had invented a new way of imagining captivity: the animals and people on exhibit appeared to be living in the wilds of their native lands.
By looking at Hagenbeck’s multiple enterprises, Savages and Beasts demonstrates how seemingly enlightened thoughts about the role of zoos and the nature of animal captivity developed within the essentially tawdry business of placing exotic creatures on broadcast show. Rothfels provides both fascinating reading and much-needed historical perspective on the nature of our relationship with the animal kingdom.
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