I was giving a tour of my zoo to a visiting colleague the other day, one who had never visited my zoo before. Midway through the tour, I realized something peculiar. I was spending about a third of my time talking about what used to be where... and another third talking about what was supposed to be where, according to scraped master plans.
Sometimes, both versions of the zoo - the past and the future-that-never-was - seem just as real to me as the zoo that I actually walk through.
When I started this blog years back, I knew that I was going to have to share a lot of zoo history - there are so many fascinating anecdotes from the history of zoos, going back to antiquity. A lot of my favorite history, however, is the relatively mundane. What exhibits were where. What species the zoo used to be in the collection. How they were cared for. How they were exhibited. I love going through old daily reports, old inventories, old zoo maps... they all help me recapture a zoo that used to be.
It's equally as fun for me to look at old master plans and see what visions people used to have for their zoos... especially before the cold, hard, reality of budgets settled over them. One zoo director I know proposed building a geodesic dome over his entire campus. It was not a small zoo. It reminds me of the doodles that I used to draw, mapping out of my dream zoos. Those were likewise designed without much respect for budgets. Or reality, for that matter.
There's a lot that you can learn about zoos by reading about their pasts. You can glean lots of interesting data on husbandry, breeding successes and failures, offspring growth and development, and social interactions. You can learn about past success and how to replicate it, and failures and how to not replicate those.
Mostly, you can have access to a great, meandering story, filled with some of the best characters of all - the animals and the people who take care of them.
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