Don't feed the human beings.

Savages and Beasts

The Birth of the Modern Zoo

Nigel Rothfels

Johns Hopkins University Press, $34.95, 304 pp.

The days of zoo animals being kept in tiny barred enclosures, slowly driven mad by confinement, isolation, and plain bad care are over. Walk into any modern zoo, and you'll see animals separated from you by moats or glass, with no bars in sight. The polar bears live in a small slice of what looks like the Arctic, the animals of the veldt graze without predators on a small plain. You might see a short description of the animals' natural habitat, and how the zoo is working to ensure that the species continues to survive in the wild, or how the zoo is trying to breed the animal in captivity lest it become extinct altogether. Your purchase of a T-shirt or a tote bag supports various conservation efforts.

But the modern zoo is a direct descendent of those earlier prisons for animals, and while much has changed, there are important ways in which contemporary zoos fulfill cultural functions not all that different from their harsh predecessors. Nigel Rothfels's engaging study, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo, traces the evolution of zoos from the menageries of powerful rulers, to entertainments for the bourgeois of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the self-proclaimed "conservation centers" of today. His account centers on animal dealer/zoo entrepreneur Carl Hagenbeck of Germany, whose innovations included the unbarred environments of contemporary zoos. The history of the Hagenbeck Animal Park (which still exists today) embodies the transformation of the basic "narrative" of the zoo from a message of dominion over nature to one of solicitous care for animals.

Still, Rothfels is eager to question the realities of contemporary zoo management. Most obviously, of course, the animals in modern zoos, in the safe simulacra of their native environments, are still captive. Now the fact of their captivity is demurely hidden from visitors by glass and moats. Rothfels describes the massive slaughter involved in capturing and transporting animals for zoos in the early days (which is part of the reason modern zoos seek to breed animals in captivity), and details the behind-the-scene aspects of the wholesale animal trade today.

This analysis includes an unsettling history of Hagenbeck's exhibition of human beings, which began in the 1870s. A group of reindeer imported by Hagenbeck was accompanied by a group of six Sami, along with their tents, weapons, sleds, and other cultural accoutrements. The "Lapland" exhibit was a great success, and exhibits of other groups of people from various exotic locales followed. The task of the human "exhibits" was to demonstrate on schedule various aspects of the daily life of their native lands, such as hunting, cooking, games, and crafts. Rothfels deftly shows how such human zoos reflected preexisting stereotypes about the lives of "savages," while doing little to advance anthropological understanding. The people shows ended in the 1930s, partly because it was increasingly difficult to find participants sufficiently "primitive" to fit the prevailing stereotypes. Another problem was how quickly the "primitives" began to adopt European modes of dress, language, commerce, and social mores. They just weren't "wild" enough. With animals, of course, that danger does not exist. Hagenbeck's experience in running the people shows was an important influence in his redesign of the zoo into moated mini-habitats. What made the human zoo shows successful was the illusion that they represented an entire exotic culture, and subsequently Hagenbeck's animal exhibitions tried to depict what life in the wild is "really" like.

Despite Rothfels's generally critical attitude, he does acknowledge that zoos have been important in saving some species from extinction (in the case of the giant panda and others, of course, zoos can have the opposite effect). Rothfels might also have acknowledged that there is a real educational value in the exhibition, as humanely as possible, of animals. It is doubtful that wildlife will be preserved if most people never see any. If nothing else, zoos provide an opportunity for wonder that, it may be hoped, will shade into respect. Habitat encroachment endangers many species. If zoos are not the solution to such problems, perhaps they can still create an awareness of the natural world that might inspire public concern for the survival of animals in the wild.

Rothfels reminds us of the troubling questions about animal captivity. However, he fails to provide evidence that captivity is in fact a cause of animal suffering. Human beings, it is true, suffer when imprisoned, even if they are physically surfeited in every way. But do animals suffer in a similar way, or is thinking they do inadmissibly anthropocentric? Rothfels dismisses the traditional signs of animal contentment such as longevity, general health, successful propagation, and absence of stereotypical behaviors (like pacing in the enclosure, self-mutilation, etc.). But he fails to ask whether the animals share his discomfort over animal captivity, or how we could discern the answer to that question.

Rothfels's work elucidates how zoos offer a carefully scripted version of how human beings should understand animals. "There is an inescapable difference between what an animal is and what people think an animal is .... [E]ach generation seems to remake its animals," he writes. And of course it is not just the animals that are remade: the shifting narrative of how we portray wildlife in zoos reflects our shifting understanding of the relationship of humankind to the natural world generally. In sum, as this fascinating book makes clear, the zoo is a better mirror of humanity than it is a window into the wild world beyond.

Savages and Beasts can help us take an important step toward a new humility in our attitudes toward wildlife. That humility might span the spectrum from small acts of environmental awareness--where do all those Neon Tetras in the pet store come from?--to a broader reflection on the connection of humankind to nonhuman creation. We speak volumes about ourselves in the wildlife narratives embedded in zoos; the new humility (which perhaps can be seen also in the work of Rothfels's Harvard colleague E. O. Wilson,) calls us instead to listen more acutely to the voices of the natural world. After all, it was the recognition that our earth is just one small planet in a vast universe that launched modern astronomy. Perhaps, in the biosphere, a similar enlightenment is underway.

Lisa Fullam is assistant professor of moral theology at the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley. She is also a doctor of veterinary medicine.