I stumbled upon this book, published in 1967, in a Melbourne secondhand store and bought it for $3, purely on the strength of the title. It's an excellent find. A search for 'Hahn' brings up only one mention of the book on Zoochat (along with a lot of posts about and photos of macaws), and that was by our much-missed friend Baldur, when was liquidating his book collection. So a review is in order.
I hadn't heard of Hahn at all before finding this book, but her wonderfully improbable Wikipedia biography identifies her as "a forgotten American literary treasure", according to The New Yorker, for whom she wrote for decades. I say 'improbable' because, apart from being an essayist and zoo aficionado, she was the first woman to graduate with an engineering degree from her university, worked with the Red Cross and lived with Pygmies in the Congo, moved on to Shanghai and was interned by the Japanese during World War II. She was a trail blazer, both literally and figuratively.
Hahn says she had liked zoos all her life, but often found herself having to defend the passion. And so in the mid-1960s she set out on a round the world trip to, as she says, 'investigate the institution as it exists today'. Perhaps by chance, Hahn set out on her tour at a time when the zoo world was rapidly evolving, when the past era of bars, tea parties and postage stamp collections was giving way to new attitudes towards animals and, especially, what zoos are and can be.
There are three main parts to 'Zoos'. The first couple of chapters are given over to the same sort of historical overview that is common in books about zoos generally. From the original medieval menageries and wild beast shows, the emergence of the Jardin des Planets and London Zoo as the twin forebears of modern zoos is duly chronicled. Hahn doesn't do this at all badly, but I didn't pay close attention because the same two chapers appear, more or less, in every book about zoos.
The bulk of the book is a travelogue, following Hahn as she visits the most prominent zoos in the world. There's a disclaimer in her introduction - she didn't have time to get to Edinburgh, Sweden or Denmark, took no heed of the zoos in Southern Europe, and also couldn't reach Latin America. She visited some game reserves in Africa but didn't feel they fit within the scope of the work. But that still leaves the core of the zoo world, in Northwestern Europe and the United States, and beyond that she also goes to Russia, India, Japan and Australia.
The tour starts in London and heads eastwards. She doesn't write walk-through descriptions of each zoo she visits; as great as such things are here on Zoochat, I'm not sure many people beyond this website would have bought a book full of them, either now or in 1967. Instead, at most zoos she is accompanied by the director or another senior staff member. Her visit starts in their office, then they show her around the grounds, pointing out whatever it is about their zoo that they are most proud of, or perhaps what they are most eager to change.
She intersperses accounts of these conversations with background about the zoo's history, or what it is that makes it a worthy inclusion in the book. Each chapter (or sub-chapter, only some zoos warrant a chapter to themselves) isn't so much a review of the place as it is an essay about its place in the zoo world.
What I found most fascinating was the insights into the directors. Some of the people she meets are among the most influential zoo leaders of the 20th century, including Heini Hediger at Zurich, Heinz Heck at Munich, Sir Edward Hallstrom at Taronga and Dr Charles Schroeder at San Diego. She misses Grzimek at Frankfurt because he was in Africa. She isn't shown around Bronx by Bill Conway, but it's clear they are acquainted nonetheless.
It's through these encounters that we get a sense of the intellectual flux zoos were in at the time. Basel's Ernst Lang subscribes to a 'theory of movement' that, as far as I can tell, amounts to believing that animals benefited from activity. Seems reasonable, though it has the added bonus of meaning that performing in shows is good for them, whereas Schroeder 'doesn't care' for shows. Heck is most proud of his 'aurochs' and 'tarpan' herds. Hallstrom credits Taronga's breeding successes to his judicious feeding of 'Robert's Mixture', whatever that is.
Many directors take the most pride in showing off their rarities to Hahn, but it's clear that by the mid-1960s breeding animals has become the benchmark of success with a species, not the mere ownership of them. Zoos are quick to point out where they've had spectacular successes and to explain away their defeats. For the most part the offspring are still seen as having monetary value but in the US, it seems, emphasis has already started to fall on keeping larger numbers of fewer species and, most shockingly, to even give up a zoo's prized rarity if it meant being able to breed from it another zoo. The role of the zoo is changing.
As far as exhibitry is concerned, there's one name on everybody's lips and that's Hagenbeck. Hamburg itself is one of the few zoos to get an entire chapter on its own - Hahn is shown around by Carl-Heinrich, the director of the time, and promptly gets quite disoriented. It comes through in her writing, too - it's one of the few points where I struggle to envision what she's describing. Another of the zoos that captures her imagination is the young Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.
When one takes into account the title of Taronga's chapter ('Concrete in Sydney') it's not hard to see where Hahn thought the future was going. It's not just Hahn, though. Even 60 years after the panoramas were built, Hagenbeck was the benchmark zoos were aspiring to. Hallstrom is a touch defensive about his concrete - it might not look like much, but you can't argue with his results, he says.
For the most part the European zoos covered are those you would expect - London and Whipsnade, Bristol and Chester, Zurich and Basel, Rotterdam, Antwerp and Paris, Vienna, Cologne, Frankfurt and Munich. The one, glaring, overwhelming omission is Berlin. There's nothing to suggest that Hahn wanted to go and couldn't, it just doesn't appear to have made the cut. I wonder, did it not have in 1967 the colossal standing it has now? I can't account for its absence in any other way.
As mentioned earlier, her travels later take her to Russia (Moscow and Leningrad), India (Delhi and Alipore; Delhi's director is an adherent of Hagenbeck's and wants to breed for conservation, Alipore's sees the collection as being purely for display), Sri Lanka and Taronga. She apparently visited the zoos in Johor Bahru and Manila, but decided neither warranted mentioning.
Japan gets two full chapters. After visiting Ueno Zoo, the director there prevails upon her to also tour Tama, Nagoya, Kobe, Kyoto and Osaka, which all get relatively brief treatments apart from Tama. Then a full chapter is given over to Inumaya Park, where the Japan Monkey Centre was conducting experiments in primate behaviour. Here Hahn is captivated by research into culture amongst Japanese macaques. The chapter, one of the best in the book, concludes with one of the researchers observing how more and more of the monkeys are taking to walking bipedally as they carry potatoes, having learned to take them to a lake to wash them. "What comes next?", Hahn asks.
Six zoos in Hahn's native United States make the cut. They are the Bronx, St Louis, San Diego, Smithsonian and Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, which all make sense, and the rather more surprising Fort Worth Zoo. It's here, in the US, where zoos seem to be teetering on the brink of the modern world. St Louis's old director, the driving force behind the chimpanzee vaudeville acts, has just departed and the zoo is grappling with both that legacy and what to do with the 'ugly' 1904 flight cage. Schroeder, of San Diego, gives a tantalising glimpse into what he wants to do with a large parcel of land the zoo owns 50km out of town. In Arizona, Hahn is particularly taken by how the Desert Museum reflects its local environment and communicates what it means.
There's a chapter called 'Private Zoos' with brief notes about Woburn, Longleat, Twycross and Catskills Game Farm. I wonder if Hahn had begun to notice what was happening at the time, especially in the UK, with the rise of the private zoo. I had been thinking about this just a couple of days before reading the book - that there was a remarkable explosion of zoo auteurs in the UK in the 1960s. I might start another thread about it because I think why it happened and what it meant for zoos in that country are perhaps quite important. But I'll leave that aside for now.
The final part of the book covers off on a couple of issues facing zoos at the time. One documents the travails caused by members of the public feeding animals, and the various ways the zoos have either combated or resigned themselves to the practice. There's an interesting passage about the 'Radcliffe diet' - an artificial mixture designed to provide all of an animal's nutritional needs. I can see how reducing the foods zoos use to just five or six varieties of the same product might be easier, but it's more difficult to imagine how they thought it was better for the animals than a varied and natural diet. But apparently some did.
A chapter called 'The Dealers' takes the story into deeply troubling territory; the reader is confronted with the venality and egoism of a couple of prominent animal traders of the time, and more importantly with the neglect and cruelty that accompanies the trade. I defy anybody to read the part where Hahn visits animal importers based in Florida and continue to pine for the days when zoos could simply buy what they wanted from the wild.
That is expanded upon in the book's conclusion, a chapter called 'Conservation'. The chapter documents Hahn's attendance at the 1966 conference on "The Role of Zoos in International Conservation of Wild Animals" at San Diego Zoo. It sort of ties the entire book together - many of the characters we've met are at the conference, and the issues they're discussing are the ones that Hahn has been exploring. Much of it is uncomfortable.
A speaker from Colombia says he's viewed zoos as the enemy, as they are providing the market for the dealers that are destroying entire populations. Another from Thailand concurs. Major Grimwood, who had coordinated the evacuation of the last remaining Arabian oryx to Phoenix a few years earlier, admonished an unnamed zoo for trying to buy the last pair of oryx to turn up rather than have them go to the main herd. A curious element of this conference is that a Tasmanian speaker, Eric Guiler, insists that there are still, in 1967, perhaps as many as 100 pairs of thylacines alive and well - he even knows personally of a den where they could be found. Very odd.
Conway closes the meeting, and the book, with a manifesto for zoos to carry fewer species, to cooperate for collection planning, to make captive breeding their raison d'etre and even to leave some 'rarities' in the wild rather than seek to maintain them in zoos. With the benefit of 50 years hindsight, it's greatly satisfying to know that his vision has been borne out.
It's a really good read - find a copy if you can.
I hadn't heard of Hahn at all before finding this book, but her wonderfully improbable Wikipedia biography identifies her as "a forgotten American literary treasure", according to The New Yorker, for whom she wrote for decades. I say 'improbable' because, apart from being an essayist and zoo aficionado, she was the first woman to graduate with an engineering degree from her university, worked with the Red Cross and lived with Pygmies in the Congo, moved on to Shanghai and was interned by the Japanese during World War II. She was a trail blazer, both literally and figuratively.
Hahn says she had liked zoos all her life, but often found herself having to defend the passion. And so in the mid-1960s she set out on a round the world trip to, as she says, 'investigate the institution as it exists today'. Perhaps by chance, Hahn set out on her tour at a time when the zoo world was rapidly evolving, when the past era of bars, tea parties and postage stamp collections was giving way to new attitudes towards animals and, especially, what zoos are and can be.
There are three main parts to 'Zoos'. The first couple of chapters are given over to the same sort of historical overview that is common in books about zoos generally. From the original medieval menageries and wild beast shows, the emergence of the Jardin des Planets and London Zoo as the twin forebears of modern zoos is duly chronicled. Hahn doesn't do this at all badly, but I didn't pay close attention because the same two chapers appear, more or less, in every book about zoos.
The bulk of the book is a travelogue, following Hahn as she visits the most prominent zoos in the world. There's a disclaimer in her introduction - she didn't have time to get to Edinburgh, Sweden or Denmark, took no heed of the zoos in Southern Europe, and also couldn't reach Latin America. She visited some game reserves in Africa but didn't feel they fit within the scope of the work. But that still leaves the core of the zoo world, in Northwestern Europe and the United States, and beyond that she also goes to Russia, India, Japan and Australia.
The tour starts in London and heads eastwards. She doesn't write walk-through descriptions of each zoo she visits; as great as such things are here on Zoochat, I'm not sure many people beyond this website would have bought a book full of them, either now or in 1967. Instead, at most zoos she is accompanied by the director or another senior staff member. Her visit starts in their office, then they show her around the grounds, pointing out whatever it is about their zoo that they are most proud of, or perhaps what they are most eager to change.
She intersperses accounts of these conversations with background about the zoo's history, or what it is that makes it a worthy inclusion in the book. Each chapter (or sub-chapter, only some zoos warrant a chapter to themselves) isn't so much a review of the place as it is an essay about its place in the zoo world.
What I found most fascinating was the insights into the directors. Some of the people she meets are among the most influential zoo leaders of the 20th century, including Heini Hediger at Zurich, Heinz Heck at Munich, Sir Edward Hallstrom at Taronga and Dr Charles Schroeder at San Diego. She misses Grzimek at Frankfurt because he was in Africa. She isn't shown around Bronx by Bill Conway, but it's clear they are acquainted nonetheless.
It's through these encounters that we get a sense of the intellectual flux zoos were in at the time. Basel's Ernst Lang subscribes to a 'theory of movement' that, as far as I can tell, amounts to believing that animals benefited from activity. Seems reasonable, though it has the added bonus of meaning that performing in shows is good for them, whereas Schroeder 'doesn't care' for shows. Heck is most proud of his 'aurochs' and 'tarpan' herds. Hallstrom credits Taronga's breeding successes to his judicious feeding of 'Robert's Mixture', whatever that is.
Many directors take the most pride in showing off their rarities to Hahn, but it's clear that by the mid-1960s breeding animals has become the benchmark of success with a species, not the mere ownership of them. Zoos are quick to point out where they've had spectacular successes and to explain away their defeats. For the most part the offspring are still seen as having monetary value but in the US, it seems, emphasis has already started to fall on keeping larger numbers of fewer species and, most shockingly, to even give up a zoo's prized rarity if it meant being able to breed from it another zoo. The role of the zoo is changing.
As far as exhibitry is concerned, there's one name on everybody's lips and that's Hagenbeck. Hamburg itself is one of the few zoos to get an entire chapter on its own - Hahn is shown around by Carl-Heinrich, the director of the time, and promptly gets quite disoriented. It comes through in her writing, too - it's one of the few points where I struggle to envision what she's describing. Another of the zoos that captures her imagination is the young Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.
When one takes into account the title of Taronga's chapter ('Concrete in Sydney') it's not hard to see where Hahn thought the future was going. It's not just Hahn, though. Even 60 years after the panoramas were built, Hagenbeck was the benchmark zoos were aspiring to. Hallstrom is a touch defensive about his concrete - it might not look like much, but you can't argue with his results, he says.
For the most part the European zoos covered are those you would expect - London and Whipsnade, Bristol and Chester, Zurich and Basel, Rotterdam, Antwerp and Paris, Vienna, Cologne, Frankfurt and Munich. The one, glaring, overwhelming omission is Berlin. There's nothing to suggest that Hahn wanted to go and couldn't, it just doesn't appear to have made the cut. I wonder, did it not have in 1967 the colossal standing it has now? I can't account for its absence in any other way.
As mentioned earlier, her travels later take her to Russia (Moscow and Leningrad), India (Delhi and Alipore; Delhi's director is an adherent of Hagenbeck's and wants to breed for conservation, Alipore's sees the collection as being purely for display), Sri Lanka and Taronga. She apparently visited the zoos in Johor Bahru and Manila, but decided neither warranted mentioning.
Japan gets two full chapters. After visiting Ueno Zoo, the director there prevails upon her to also tour Tama, Nagoya, Kobe, Kyoto and Osaka, which all get relatively brief treatments apart from Tama. Then a full chapter is given over to Inumaya Park, where the Japan Monkey Centre was conducting experiments in primate behaviour. Here Hahn is captivated by research into culture amongst Japanese macaques. The chapter, one of the best in the book, concludes with one of the researchers observing how more and more of the monkeys are taking to walking bipedally as they carry potatoes, having learned to take them to a lake to wash them. "What comes next?", Hahn asks.
Six zoos in Hahn's native United States make the cut. They are the Bronx, St Louis, San Diego, Smithsonian and Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, which all make sense, and the rather more surprising Fort Worth Zoo. It's here, in the US, where zoos seem to be teetering on the brink of the modern world. St Louis's old director, the driving force behind the chimpanzee vaudeville acts, has just departed and the zoo is grappling with both that legacy and what to do with the 'ugly' 1904 flight cage. Schroeder, of San Diego, gives a tantalising glimpse into what he wants to do with a large parcel of land the zoo owns 50km out of town. In Arizona, Hahn is particularly taken by how the Desert Museum reflects its local environment and communicates what it means.
There's a chapter called 'Private Zoos' with brief notes about Woburn, Longleat, Twycross and Catskills Game Farm. I wonder if Hahn had begun to notice what was happening at the time, especially in the UK, with the rise of the private zoo. I had been thinking about this just a couple of days before reading the book - that there was a remarkable explosion of zoo auteurs in the UK in the 1960s. I might start another thread about it because I think why it happened and what it meant for zoos in that country are perhaps quite important. But I'll leave that aside for now.
The final part of the book covers off on a couple of issues facing zoos at the time. One documents the travails caused by members of the public feeding animals, and the various ways the zoos have either combated or resigned themselves to the practice. There's an interesting passage about the 'Radcliffe diet' - an artificial mixture designed to provide all of an animal's nutritional needs. I can see how reducing the foods zoos use to just five or six varieties of the same product might be easier, but it's more difficult to imagine how they thought it was better for the animals than a varied and natural diet. But apparently some did.
A chapter called 'The Dealers' takes the story into deeply troubling territory; the reader is confronted with the venality and egoism of a couple of prominent animal traders of the time, and more importantly with the neglect and cruelty that accompanies the trade. I defy anybody to read the part where Hahn visits animal importers based in Florida and continue to pine for the days when zoos could simply buy what they wanted from the wild.
That is expanded upon in the book's conclusion, a chapter called 'Conservation'. The chapter documents Hahn's attendance at the 1966 conference on "The Role of Zoos in International Conservation of Wild Animals" at San Diego Zoo. It sort of ties the entire book together - many of the characters we've met are at the conference, and the issues they're discussing are the ones that Hahn has been exploring. Much of it is uncomfortable.
A speaker from Colombia says he's viewed zoos as the enemy, as they are providing the market for the dealers that are destroying entire populations. Another from Thailand concurs. Major Grimwood, who had coordinated the evacuation of the last remaining Arabian oryx to Phoenix a few years earlier, admonished an unnamed zoo for trying to buy the last pair of oryx to turn up rather than have them go to the main herd. A curious element of this conference is that a Tasmanian speaker, Eric Guiler, insists that there are still, in 1967, perhaps as many as 100 pairs of thylacines alive and well - he even knows personally of a den where they could be found. Very odd.
Conway closes the meeting, and the book, with a manifesto for zoos to carry fewer species, to cooperate for collection planning, to make captive breeding their raison d'etre and even to leave some 'rarities' in the wild rather than seek to maintain them in zoos. With the benefit of 50 years hindsight, it's greatly satisfying to know that his vision has been borne out.
It's a really good read - find a copy if you can.
