If you’ve ever visited the Phoenix Zoo or the Reid Park Zoo in Tucson, you probably spent most of your time focused on the animals. But the idea of the city zoo as a scientific educational institution is a relatively recent phenomenon.
For this summer’s edition of the Journal of Arizona History, researcher Courtney Lamb wrote about the early days of zoos, when they were more like roadside attractions.
As Lamb told The Show’s Sam Dingman, for a long time, zoos were a place to display not only animals, but also the egos of the eccentric men who owned them.
Full conversation
COURTNEY LAMB: They were very much created by people who can, who were very wealthy and very connected and considered themselves. Often they were both hunters and conservationists. So they had an interest that had to do with feeling and ownership of the land and of the animals on the land. And therefore, for some of them also feeling a responsibility towards making sure that those animals were propagated. And zoos were a way to do that and also to show off power.
And you know that you had access to these animals and that you could transport them so that, you know, played on a long centuries-long tradition of menagerie and, and wealthy, you know, monarchs having menagerie of their own.
SAM DINGMAN: Well, a couple, a couple of those interesting characters. One is Frank Murphy. I found a very interesting news item from him in the, in the 1912 Tombstone Epitaph that basically talks about his menagerie, to use your word, Courtney. And how, how remarkable it seemed back, back in 1912. It says here that he has two mountain lions, two wildcats, a badger, two civet cats, three foxes, two black-tailed deer, a black eagle, a raven, a guinea pig and four monkeys.
LAMB: Yeah, quite a collection. Quite a random collection. He was a Prescott railroad baron and so he started this private zoo. And yeah, there were very much these characters who just sort of decided that attaching yourself especially to exotic animals was desirable and it indicated something positive about you.
DINGMAN: It's kind of interesting to think about this being a period where if you were going to be the proprietor of the zoo, you had to own the land, you had to have the collection and then you also had to have the know how to care for these animals.
Our producer actually flagged another really interesting piece about another figure in this curious history. Harry “Indian” Miller, who we should say was not Indigenous. But that's a, a nickname that he apparently went by. This very interesting item in the, in the Winslow Mail from 1925 about how he encounters this guy who says he has two eagles to sell and Miller buys the eagles from him, but then realizes they can't fly. So he ends up just taking care of them and, and teaching them how to fly and they end up becoming fixtures at, at his personal, at his personal zoo.
LAMB: Yeah, I, I'll tell you, you're talking to the right person because my master's thesis was actually about Harry Miller. Harry “Indian” Miller who did spend, yeah, who spent two decades pretending to be an Apache Indian, which he was absolutely not. And he would regularly get mauled by these animals because he handled them a lot because this idea of, so what if you're not a rich person, you're showing off that you have a connection to the animals by handling them a lot.
DINGMAN: Yeah. So tell us how we, how do, how do we get from this period of time where the zoo is more associated with this kind of individual eccentric figure and into a time when it becomes kind of a major anchor institution of a city?
LAMB: The professionalization of zoos really, in America especially, really took off and really, or was formulated in the ‘70s because of these pressures, animal rights and animal liberation movements. A lot of very legitimate questions that, that the zoos didn't necessarily have great answers for because they had been doing something that was very established for a very long time and their expertise was dialed into doing it that way.
So making that shift took a while and it was contentious. It was really batten down the hatches in a lot of ways of not wanting to engage with the critics too much or of, of pushing aside the criticism. But meanwhile, they were in fact professionalizing the whole, the, the, the whole thing, you couldn't just show up, you know, it, it changed in the era of the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘09s, you couldn't just show up and say, I'd love to be a zookeeper.
I mean, we see this in this Reid Park Zoo. It was just you know, a parks and rec guy being like, you know, let's have some animals. You know, and then he just kind of made it happen whether that's good or bad, it's not the question he was able to do that. And then so moving past that to where you needed a degree and there were apprenticeships and there were people with expertise in biology and zoology was I think a response to all of this, these questions of we can't just be amusement parks with living collections.
DINGMAN: But what about the transition from, I mean, the Reid Park Zoo is a 501(c)3 nonprofit, same for the Phoenix Zoo, that's very different than, you know, the private menagerie of an eccentric collector who's charging you money when you're driving along Route 66. That must have been a pretty significant transition to, to shift public perception of these things from the realm of, of private ownership to a kind of public resource. How, how did that happen?
LAMB: So if you read “The History of Zoos in America,” some people have said, look, there was, they, they positioned it as, yes, there was a change in messaging at this time because of these pressures of the environmental movement and species extinction and so on. But that, the actual practices of how the animals are kept, which animals are kept, how big are the collections, how diverse, you know, how many types of animals are there that, the practices weren't that different. And it took a while for the practices to catch up to the messaging.
But we also had as a response to all that in the ‘80s, especially in Arizona, an era of sanctuaries. That became the new idea that you would have. So for instance, the keepers of the Wild Nature Park is somebody who had worked in Vegas, you know, for, for animals that had been used in acts there, you know, that's a different kind of positioning of what this facility is.
But ultimately, you go, it's animals in cages or enclosures, you know, it's sort of the same, but the thinking behind it, the intention. That's what we see again and again in zoo history, what is the intention behind it, and then physically, what is it like when you're there? Well, the physical part tends to be very recognizable throughout history.
DINGMAN: Zoo layout is sort of applying human organizational philosophy to the natural world. I think you were alluding earlier, Courtney, to the fact that the philosophy behind the layout and messaging of zoos has really started to evolve. So tell us about some of the more avant garde or cutting edge ways of organizing zoos that are, that are shifting.
LAMB: Multispecies enclosures. That's a big change that I'm seeing more and more that there's a, there's an understanding that you get so used to seeing them sort of isolated in small groups, you know, with a, with a label next to them. And it can be quite thrilling and shocking to see a huge herd running across the desert and to see them in their habitat like that.
And I think that is something maybe more zoos are trying to pull in to help us understand what the stakes are. But also it's a different way. We haven't been encouraged to think of ecosystems this way for a long, long time. So if we are being steered towards that by zoos, I think that can only be a positive thing.
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