Visiting zoos 25 years ago

Simon Hampel

Simon Hampel

Administrator
Staff member
20+ year member
The year is 1996. The internet isn't widely available yet in most countries (Australia only got widely accessible public internet in 1995 - previously it was just universities, government and some large businesses). Mobile phones have only recently become common and cheap enough for the average person to own one.

How was visiting zoos different for you back then. Obviously if you were a child - you were reliant on your parents to take you - so how was your experience different to what it is now?

How did you find out about zoos?
Which zoos did you visit?
Were you travelling internationally to visit zoos?
How did your zoo visits differ to what you do now?
How did the zoos themselves differ to what they are now?

Naturally, this thread is only for people who were actually alive 25 years ago :rolleyes:
 
Back in 1998, I had only been to a tiny number of zoological collections - my family were very poor, so we couldn't really afford to do all that much, with our holidays generally comprising camping trips in the Scottish countryside. As such I had only been to the following:

Highland Wildlife Park (c.1989-1990)
Oban Sealife Centre (a few times in the 1990s)
Scarborough Sealife Centre (c.1995-ish)
Skye Serpentarium (c.1997)

...all of which were spur-of-the-moment visits on the part of my parents, from what I recall.

Of the collections in question, Oban Sealife and Skye Serpentarium no longer exist, and I haven't visited Scarborough Sealife since - but I've visited Highland Wildlife Park on a few occasions, as have many Zoochatters, and it is fairly safe to say that it is a completely different place now, with the exhibits in the walk-around portion of the collection both being significantly larger and of better quality, and the species held in the collection being from a wide range of highland and cold-climate areas worldwide rather than being Scottish-endemic as was the case when I first visited.
 
In 1996, I had recently finished uni, got my first job and had been married for 2 years already and my new wife was pretty keen on visiting zoos.

Unfortunately, we were young and didn't have a lot of money available - so weren't able to travel much. As such, our zoo visits were largely restricted to Adelaide Zoo and the newly opened Monarto Zoo and perhaps the occasional small wildlife park in the area.

Digital cameras weren't really a thing yet, mobile phones couldn't take photos - and we only had a cheap point-and-shoot film camera and it cost a lot of money to develop the photos - so the photos we took were limited and of average quality.

Monarto Zoo was very different to what it is now - you basically got on a small bus, which drove you everywhere - including into the lion enclosure. It didn't have the extensive walking trail network that it does now, or the visitor centre and cafe.

Adelaide Zoo was very old and lacking in investment - many of the enclosures were of poor quality and not up to modern standards - but it was still a really nice place to visit.

Looking through my collection of photos taken in that era - I didn't really have photos from the zoo visits. It wasn't until around the year 2000 when I started travelling for work a bit that I began visiting more zoos and taking more photos.
 
@Simon Hampel you are a spring chicken. In 1995 I was in my late '30's, recently divorced and deciding I should pursue my dream of opening a zoo. I was applying to attend the Endangered Species Management Course at Jersey Zoo, and was on tenterhooks to hear if my application had been accepted.

Some of my earliest memories are of Melbourne Zoo, which was a dank, dark place back then, Healesville was better but still had some awful enclosures. I can however just remember King vultures at Melbourne Zoo. There was an active campaign to close the zoo, and I remember a pro-closure article being used in a clear-thinking exercise at school. I remember Alfred Dunbavin-Butcher coming to my school to talk about his plans for the zoo, and the excitement at the opening of the new lion enclosure. I'd take the train across Melbourne every school holidays to visit the zoo, and when Friends of the Zoos started, became member no. 68. A week at Melbourne Zoo in a school program that was a precursor of work experience saw me behind the scenes, and I held the hand of one of the new gorillas. I followed the developments at Melbourne Zoo with great interest, and was enthralled by the Hancocks master plan, only seeing any chance of it coming to completion destroyed by the decision to keep the elephants.

Growing up I used every opportunity to see some of the other zoos in Australia. Taronga and Manly Oceanarium were early visits. A family trip to Broken Hill saw me at the Silverton Fauna Park and the Golden River Zoo in Mildura and a friend's parents took us to Bacchus Marsh Lion Park, all three gone now. Then there was Kingston Gardens, now Phillip Island Wildlife Park, a frequent destination as it was near our family holiday house.

Thanks to the Jumbo Jet revolution I was able to travel widely throughout east Asia. By 1995 I had visited zoos in Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan.

Fortunately Jersey accepted me for the course in 1996, and my trip, my first time in the UK, included visits to 14 other British zoos. A round the world ticket meant I visited the USA for the fist time, and so got to Woodland Park and the San Diego zoos.

There is a maxim that you should never turn your hobby into your business, and I've done that twice. Today I'm more interested in seeing animals in the wild. I still visit zoos, but it is more about what I can learn, than just because they are there. Pre-COVID I was visiting Melbourne Zoo two or three times a year, but for meetings and functions. Any sighting of animals tended to be accidental.
 
I was still not that interested in zoos, more in animals in general.

I knew some zoos were interesting to visit, but generally my visits depended on me backpacking in the vicinity for other reasons. I had a huge list of institutions which I dreamed to see.

There was the feeling of expectation and awe, because going to a zoo I did not know what I will see. There was no way of knowing what species a zoo has, or how exhibits look like, before actually going oneself. Perhaps some snippet in a newspaper or in a TV. People then were very good at hunting such pieces of information, not now when they are overwhelmed by things in the internet. Sometimes I was surprised, other times I was disappointed. I went to London zoo and thought they have giant pandas, and only after walking all around the zoo I learned they left the zoo some years ago. But unexpectedly, I was thrilled to see my first clouded leopard.

And actually, I knew animals themselves much less. There were only animals books, no internet, and the books were usually expensive, hard to get in a library, and covered only more common species. There was no digital photography, so one often knew only some distorted hand illustration of an animal, and was surprised that it looked different in the real life.

Zoos had much more varied collections back then, both numer of species, differences between zoos and between years, and one could realistically count to see new animals at every visit. Small carnivores, deer or small birds were much more varied then. There were bears all over. A larger zoo in Europe almost could be expected to have polar bears and brown bears, and often 1-2 more bear species. There were small carnivores all over - foxes, jackals, martens, weasels, badgers, genets, mongoose, small cats, raccoons etc. They were actually saddest part of zoos, because they usually were in too small cages, which smelled strongly of their musk glands and animals stereotyped in a maddening way. But they were there. Many species are now gone from zoos forever.

But exhibits were more plain, smaller, and much less furnished. Bars were obvious. Some grass and few dead branches counted as a naturalistic exhibit.

Animals did not breed by default, and there was a category of prize animals which few zoos could get. For example gorillas or bongo antelope were rare. Zoos were limited by aviability of animals, not exhibits. Today there is an excess of gorillas compared to zoos able to house them.
 
As a child I was really interested in animals, so managed to persuade my parents to include zoos in our holiday plans (London, Edinburgh, Whipsnade, Peakirk, various bird collections). Read zoology at university, did some foreign travelling including various key zoos such as Antwerp, Frankfurt, San Diego, Arizona-Sonora, Healesville; but these transcontinental trips allowed more of the species to actually be seen in the wild, so my emphasis shifted to travel for wild species rather than captive species.
 
Before the internet and mobile phones I collected any zoo related material I came across. My internet was a shoe box filled with zoo leaflets which I updated as and when I came across new ones. Tourist information offices were high on my list of places to visit when in a new town and service stations always had collections of tourist leaflets.

There was still a network out there, for example Zoo magazines came and went over time, the International ZooYearbook was a good sauce of information and IZES began in 1995.

It just took more effort but in some ways was more rewarding.
 
For me the zoo going experience changed more than just 25 years ago, mine changed dramatically in 1992.

Prior to '92, most of the zoo memories I had were of the small zoo in Grand Island, Nebraska called the Heritage Zoo. My mom would take my brother and I there frequently during the year as it is a fairly small town and the zoo would only take us a little bit of time. We would occasionally visit the Lincoln Children's Zoo and the Omaha Henry Doorly Zoo, but as both Lincoln and Omaha were more than an hour away, these weren't frequent visits. I remember most of what Omaha was like prior to 1992, and as many know on here, there are very little similarities to the zoo that exists today.

Living in Nebraska, we didn't really have knowledge of other zoos around the country aside from the well known zoos in history, San Diego, Central Park, Bronx, St. Louis, but that was a bout it. For the most part, the only international zoo on my radar as a young person was the London Zoo.

However, in 1992, the Henry Doorly Zoo was about to open the Lied Jungle, and back then, the zoo would put scale models of their new mega exhibits that were soon to come in the Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom Pavilion building at the front of the zoo. As a kid, these models created tons of excitement for what's to come.

My family and I were there on opening day for the Lied Jungle and still remember it to this day. I wasn't too terribly old at the time, but it was an experience one couldn't forget. As would become the norm for all the other Omaha Zoo mega buildings that would open, opening day saw you basically standing in a queue for the entire duration of your visit in the building, moving only as fast as the person in front of you, which to say was pretty slow.

From this point on, my brother and I were all about visiting again and again to see the jungle in Nebraska. We would make a couple visits to Omaha throughout the year to go to the zoo from then on in the 90s and rarely missed any opening day of all the new exhibits.

The only way I found out about new zoos during this time period was by grabbing the flyers or brochures you would see at visitor centers/truck stops during family road trips. Back in these days, many of these brochures would include maps of the facilities and would spark my interest seeing the different species one could encounter.

By the time 1996 rolled around, I had gotten the book, The Zoo Book by Allen Nyhuis (published 1994) which I'm sure a bunch of folks on here also have, and began becoming enamored with visiting many of the zoos listed in the book. I would usually bug my parents to include any zoo that we encountered on our family vacations so I could see them for myself after reading about them. This is how in the 90s I was able to visit Kansas City and Denver, but then as the 2000s rolled around and high school and college took most of my time.

The good thing for me was that I attended university in Omaha, so when I moved here permanently in 2005, I've been able to visit whenever I want for the past 16 years. Prior to 2005, it was only a handful of times for the other 16 years I remember visiting the zoo.
 
  • Like
Reactions: MRJ
MGolka said:
For me the zoo going experience changed more than just 25 years ago, mine changed dramatically in 1992.

Prior to '92, most of the zoo memories I had were of the small zoo in Grand Island, Nebraska called the Heritage Zoo. My mom would take my brother and I there frequently during the year as it is a fairly small town and the zoo would only take us a little bit of time. We would occasionally visit the Lincoln Children's Zoo and the Omaha Henry Doorly Zoo, but as both Lincoln and Omaha were more than an hour away, these weren't frequent visits. I remember most of what Omaha was like prior to 1992, and as many know on here, there are very little similarities to the zoo that exists today.

Living in Nebraska, we didn't really have knowledge of other zoos around the country aside from the well known zoos in history, San Diego, Central Park, Bronx, St. Louis, but that was a bout it. For the most part, the only international zoo on my radar as a young person was the London Zoo.

However, in 1992, the Henry Doorly Zoo was about to open the Lied Jungle, and back then, the zoo would put scale models of their new mega exhibits that were soon to come in the Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom Pavilion building at the front of the zoo. As a kid, these models created tons of excitement for what's to come.

My family and I were there on opening day for the Lied Jungle and still remember it to this day. I wasn't too terribly old at the time, but it was an experience one couldn't forget. As would become the norm for all the other Omaha Zoo mega buildings that would open, opening day saw you basically standing in a queue for the entire duration of your visit in the building, moving only as fast as the person in front of you, which to say was pretty slow.

From this point on, my brother and I were all about visiting again and again to see the jungle in Nebraska. We would make a couple visits to Omaha throughout the year to go to the zoo from then on in the 90s and rarely missed any opening day of all the new exhibits.

The only way I found out about new zoos during this time period was by grabbing the flyers or brochures you would see at visitor centers/truck stops during family road trips. Back in these days, many of these brochures would include maps of the facilities and would spark my interest seeing the different species one could encounter.

By the time 1996 rolled around, I had gotten the book, The Zoo Book by Allen Nyhuis (published 1994) which I'm sure a bunch of folks on here also have, and began becoming enamored with visiting many of the zoos listed in the book. I would usually bug my parents to include any zoo that we encountered on our family vacations so I could see them for myself after reading about them. This is how in the 90s I was able to visit Kansas City and Denver, but then as the 2000s rolled around and high school and college took most of my time.

The good thing for me was that I attended university in Omaha, so when I moved here permanently in 2005, I've been able to visit whenever I want for the past 16 years. Prior to 2005, it was only a handful of times for the other 16 years I remember visiting the zoo.
Click to expand...
Isn’t Nyhuis the name of a ZC member? I assume that would be the author.
 
In 1996 I was working at Orana Park. I knew quite a lot of zoos because the University library had all the IZYs, and I had some encyclopaedic type zoo books (including Anthony Smith's Animals on View).

The only foreign country I'd been to, though, was Australia when I went to Melbourne for a Madonna concert (several years earlier) and visited the Melbourne Zoo. At that time it was a lot more expensive to cross the Tasman because I think only one airline did it so there was no price competition. Otherwise I had only rarely left Christchurch, so had visited hardly any other New Zealand collections. But in those days there were a lot more species in New Zealand zoos than there are now.

The most frustrating thing about those days, apart for the difficulty of actually finding out information about zoos, was that cameras used film and each roll only had 24 or 36 frames. The film was expensive to buy, and expensive to develop, and you had no idea how a photo would turn out until days or weeks later (spoiler: for me, the photos never turned out well!). And because each photo was precious you only took photos of things you really wanted a photo of. And of course you also had to remember to take the lens cap off the camera before taking the photos. I'd like to say that I never used up an entire roll of film at a zoo without once taking off the lens cap and not knowing until the photos were developed, but that would be a lie...
 
Chlidonias said:
The most frustrating thing about those days, apart for the difficulty of actually finding out information about zoos, was that cameras used film and each roll only had 24 or 36 frames. The film was expensive to buy, and expensive to develop, and you had no idea how a photo would turn out until days or weeks later (spoiler: for me, the photos never turned out well!). And because each photo was precious you only took photos of things you really wanted a photo of.
Click to expand...

I can certainly remember the 24 or 36 frame camera films. (I can just about actually remember box brownie cameras too, which took 8(?) photos and had a little window counter in the back with dots) As you said, each one used was precious. Sometimes I look back on old historic zoo photos of mine and think, why did I only take one( of a certain animal) and not more...the answer of course was film.
 
Last edited:
And following on from that, in the late 1960's I undertook a 'budget' zoo trip around Europe that took in about fifteen zoos. One (or was it two) roll of film had to suffice for the whole trip!
 
I think I am just a couple of years younger than @Pertinax. I only visited Chester, the local zoo, as a boy. Back in the 1960s my zoo information came largely from TV and the local library. I think that the first book I actually bought was 'The Penguin Guide to British Zoos' by Geoffrey Schomberg, which was published in 1970 when I was at college. In 1971 I visited Bristol, Twycross and Birdland before buying my first 35mm camera and adding London, Dudley, Cotswold and Marwell to my list. After Part 1 of my finals in 1972, I bought my first International Zoo Yearbook at Foyle's in London (£6 for the paperback :eek:) before boarding the train for the ferry to France. I had done my research with guide books, so I was able to visit the Jardin des Plantes and Vincennes in Paris and I managed an extra trip to Thoiry, then I took the sleeper to Zurich, getting off for a day at Basle before completing my journey. In 1973, with the Yearbook's help, I did a longer trip through Germany (West Germany as was) to Zurich and Basle, back through Germany to the Netherlands with a stop at Antwerp.
Like @Pertinax my trips were done at minimum expense, but I carried 2 cameras, loaded with Kodachrome 64 (64 ISO) and High Speed Ektachrome (160 ISO!), and I took enough film to take perhaps 70 photos at each zoo - although I did need to buy extra on my second trip. Of course, I would have loved to take more, but it meant I had to be very careful taking each photo and only rarely to risk taking one that might not 'come out'. The other disadvantage of film was that I had to wait until I returned home to send them for processing and then wait another week or 10 days before I could see them.
 
gentle lemur said:
Like @Pertinax my trips were done at minimum expense, but I carried 2 cameras, loaded with Kodachrome 64 (64 ISO) and High Speed Ektachrome (160 ISO!), and I took enough film to take perhaps 70 photos at each zoo -.
Click to expand...
The beginnings of your career as an ace zoo photographer no doubt.;) You certainly have a good selection from your early trips, much better than I have. I still take relatively few photos -even nowadays.
 
Talking of cameras I must still have my first animal/zoo photo, a black and white photo of a Brazilian tapir with young at Melbourne Zoo, taken with my mothers box brownie. I can also remember my father getting his first SLR, with zoom lens, a thing of wonder at the time. And also the excitement of sending away a film to get a box of slides back a couple of weeks later.
 
Last edited:
Chlidonias said:
The only foreign country I'd been to, though, was Australia when I went to Melbourne for a Madonna concert (several years earlier) and visited the Melbourne Zoo.
Click to expand...
I hate to say it, but I was probably at that concert.
 
Hello,
I give my testimony from France, so my feeling could be different on some points.
Conversely to @Jurek7 and others, I think that there are more species now in French zoos than in the 90's.
A possible explanation can be the fact that most French zoos were small or medium-sized private collections that were mainly focused on attractive species, with little regards to expensive or difficultly available animals.
Of course there were animals much more common in these times : Fennec Foxes, Barbary Sheep, True Gazelles, Asiatic Black Bears or even Chimpanzees.
In an average French zoo, there were plenty of Lions, Tigers, Leopards and Giraffes of unspecified breeds, Chimpanzees (often housed in poor exhibits), 2 or 3 Elephants... Polar Bears were quite frequent.

But Red Pandas, Indian Rhinos, Malayan Tapirs, Cheetahs, Snow Leopards, Gorillas, Penguins and even Meerkats were rare or inexistent!
For the same reasons there weren't plenty of small mammals, except Fennec Foxes, Raccoons and a few other species.

Few zoos had true rarities, as the 2 zoos of Paris (and especially the Zoo de Vincennes) that housed in these times Aye-ayes, Sifakas, ONE Giant Panda, Okapis, Four-horned Antelopes, Eld's Deer, an African Forest Elephant, Pygmy Hippos...

To see more rarities, one should go much earlier in time, during the colonial or immediately postcolonial times, at least in the 1960's (I wasn't even born in these times!)
 
gentle lemur said:
The other disadvantage of film was that I had to wait until I returned home to send them for processing and then wait another week or 10 days before I could see them.
Click to expand...
I forgot about that - it took a week for the photos to be developed! Presumably they sent the negatives somewhere else to be processed rather than in-store.
 
  • Like
Reactions: MRJ
Chlidonias said:
I forgot about that - it took a week for the photos to be developed! Presumably they sent the negatives somewhere else to be processed rather than in-store.
Click to expand...
By the mid '90's in store "mini" photo labs were well established, and you could drop your film off in the morning and with luck pick up the prints in the afternoon. Prior to that the film had to be sent off to the lab, and at least here drop off and pick up was usually the chemist. Colour print film and processing was expensive and black and white was still very common. One option was to only develop the film and then select from the negatives the photos you wanted printed. Of course black and white film could be developed and printed at home, and for the serious photo hobbyist, that was all part and parcel, allowing them "artistic" control from shutter to print. Slides were the thing for colour photography and slide nights where quite a thing when I was gowning up, inviting your friends around for supper and 50 of the best from your overseas trip. You would perhaps get prints from one or two of your best slides to hang on the wall, and publishers would want slides for any colour plates in books. Actually it has only been in the last few years that publishers have stopped asking for slides, prints were never good enough.
 
Chlidonias said:
I forgot about that - it took a week for the photos to be developed! Presumably they sent the negatives somewhere else to be processed rather than in-store.
Click to expand...
Colour negative films and most slide films had the dyes for each colour incorporated in the different layers of the emulsion. This meant that they could be processed quite simply and quickly in small labs, or even in home darkrooms if you had enough skill and confidence: but Kodachrome, the best quality slide film, needed a very long, complex and sensitive processing cycle because each layer of the emulsion was dyed separately after the exposure. I think Kodak licensed some independent labs to process Kodachrome in the USA, but in the rest of the world the price of the film always included processing in a Kodak lab and there was a yellow envelope in each box to send your exposed film, in its canister, back to Kodak. Then you had to wait a week, or a bit longer at holiday time, for your slides to arrive. I still remember the particular sound that a box of slides made as it came through the letterbox and fell to the floor. Each box would contain some excitement and some disappointment too :):(
 
  • Like
Reactions: MRJ
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top