A bit more of the history

_Elsa_

Rachel goes back to reading the article. 

‘Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, iguanas, bison, guinea pigs, llamas, turkeys, Muscovy ducks, squirrels, and many species of birds flooded Europe. And these animals came to European menageries from all directions. In 1515, Sultan Muzaffar Shah of Malacca sent the governor of Portuguese India a rhinoceros as a gift between friends. The governor then re-gifted it to Dom Manuel I, king of Portugal. All of these animals were showcased as symbols of royal wealth and power.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as nation-states replaced kingdoms, the bursting menageries evolved from private collections to public collections, supported by taxes instead of individual coffers.

Even though zoos began to replace menageries, elements of the latter remained commonplace: especially the simple cages of confinement and the symbolisms embodied in their bars. The lions who paced the perimeter of their zoo cages (a common sight in zoos until the last quarter of the twentieth century) would not have known that their captivity was centered in a “new” institution.

Nonetheless, as public zoos become common sights in cities, they became large and complex institutions compared to their privately owned predecessors. They grew in size, housed more animals, and established international markets in those animals.

 

Over the course of the twentieth century, zoological parks increasingly bred animals on site. While the vast majority of these animals would not (and could not) be introduced or reintroduced into natural habitats, this trend did mean that the populations of zoo inhabitants would become more captive-bred than captured. 

No matter what they meant to their human captors, zoo animals always had their own intentions. Zoo animals attacked. They ran away. They made demands. They resisted control. They refused to live out the scripts they were given. 

The zoological park was an unpredictable place, as a quick look at the first eight years of the Philadelphia Zoo, from 1874 to 1882, shows. A bison trampled the fence surrounding its pasture in order to charge the elk in the neighboring exhibit. A seal climbed over the railing surrounding the seal pond and wandered into the neighboring pond. A kangaroo broke one of its legs attempting to jump out of its enclosure after being frightened by the sound of a nearby locomotive.’ (Source) 

Let’s continue - The Enclosure

Start at the beginning – The girls go to the zoo