Zoo History: Hagenbeck Comes to America

Recent decades have seen tremendous innovation in the techniques and technologies that zoos use to display their animals.  There are exhibits with underwater viewing, providing exciting new vantage points for penguins, otters, crocodilians, polar bears, seals, and hippos.  There are walk-through exhibits, originally primarily for birds, but now also featuring kangaroos, lemurs, and other species.  There is super-strong glass and barely-visible mesh, allowing nearly unobstructed views of animals up close.  There is also (to my intense skepticism) reverse lighting, which theoretically allows for nocturnal viewing of nighttime animals, which in my experience never seems to really work.

All of these new methods, revolutionary at the time of their development and introduction, have since been replicated over and over again by zoos around the globe.  At the time of unveiling, each is considered to be the latest, greatest new idea in zoo design.  At the end of the day, however, all are simply variations of a single idea, which isn't even that new.  It's the idea that the optimal way to display wild animals in a zoo setting is by trying to replicate their natural environment.

The visionary behind that concept was the German animal dealer, Carl Hagenbeck Jr., who put the theory into practice when he opened his own zoo near Hamburg, Germany.  Hagenbeck's zoo was a hit, and today he is considered the pioneer of modern zoo design.  As is often the case with revolutionary new ideas that today are accepted and taken for granted everywhere, we tend to gloss over the fact that, at the time, a lot of respected voices in the profession considered his ideas to be heresy.  Carl certainly didn't have too many fans in the good ol' US of A.

Resistance to the innovative new zoo exhibits was largely driven by the eminence grise of American zoos, the brilliant - if irascible - William T. Hornaday, the veritable founder of the Smithsonian National Zoo and then the director of the Bronx Zoo (a name that he loathed, insisting upon "the gardens of the New York Zoological Society").  Hornaday was adamant that "the Hagenbeck fad [which] has inoculated some half-baked western zoo-makers" was an abomination that needed to be stomped out.  In his opinion, larger, more natural zoo exhibits were counterproductive for what he saw as the primary goal of the zoo - allowing scientists to study animals.  They put the animal too far away for the scientists to observe, and the moats that they required ate up lots of valuable space that could be better put to other purposes - such as housing more animals.  In many ways Hornaday was one of the most progressive zoo directors in America - it was he who first saw the role of zoos supporting conservation of animals in the wild - but on this point (on a lot of points, actually) he was obstinate.

This exhibit - currently housing coatis, previously monkeys - is part of the bear grottos of the Denver Zoo.

Part of his opposition, to be sure, was based on principle.  Other parts, however, seemed to be driven by racial prejudice.  Hornaday had been a tremendous fan of Hagenbeck, corresponding with him regularly - but that was before World War I.  Afterwards, Hornaday developed a bitter grudge against the German people, to such an extent that he cancelled the Zoo's subscriptions to all German journals and professional literature (the Society's board overruled him on this).  In his mind, natural zoo exhibits were a diabolical invention of the Hun, and to utilize them was to admit German supremacy over America in the eyes of the world.  And whenever William T. Hornaday made up his mind about something, it was almost impossible to change it.

Whenever colleagues wrote to him for advice as to whether or not they should build new "Hagenbeck" exhibits, Hornaday remain very opposed.  Still, a few resisted.  The first resistance popped up in the Denver Zoo, where a bear exhibit opened in 1918.  A few years later, Saint Louis Zoo, having written to Hornaday for advice on the subject and then decided to disregard it, opened a series of bear exhibits (bear exhibits were popular prototypes for "natural" exhibits because they largely consisted on towering rock formations, which looked very impressive.  To be fair, most of these early "natural" bear exhibits were not very good at providing a habitat that facilitated natural behavior for the animals, but they did look good on postcards).

Hornaday scoffed, claiming "the Saint Louis Zoological Society is making a great mistake in putting all its money into costly piles of rock and concrete to shelter far distant animals."  Looking back from 2018, I think the St. Louis Zoo would disagree.  Having just moved their Andean bears and polar bears into new exhibits, the zoo has renovated the bear dens - preserving the original rockwork - into a massive new habitat for grizzly bears.

These grizzly bears at the St. Louis Zoo are in the old exhibit which predates the current one, but the rockwork in the background - the original from the early twentieth century - has been saved and incorporated into the new habitat.

To Hornaday's undying ire, after his retirement, his own successor, Dr. Reid Blair, decided to dabble with Hagenbeck's exhibit style.  To this day, the Bronx Zoo boasts of a lovely African Plains exhibit, where lions overlook a herd of peacefully grazing nyala antelope.  Decades later, it still stands - surrounded by a host of other open, natural enclosures, many utilizing technological components that would have seemed like magic at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Sometimes, it can be slightly difficult to see some of the animals.  What you can see, however, is often beautiful, and with the added space and natural features, it's possible for a student or scientist to learn a lot more about animal behavior and biology than would be in a small, sterile room at close range.  So yeah, given a chance to warm up to it, I think that Hornaday would have approved (although I doubt that he would even for a second have conceded that he was wrong).