In his parks in 16th-century India, Akbar the Great employed personal doctors to look after his tigers, cheetahs, deer and five thousand elephants, and invited the populace at large to visit the animals: 'Meet your brothers, take them to your hearts and respect them.' But as David Hancocks colourfully describes, most precursors of the modern zoo have been the opposite of this, from the circuses of Rome to the travelling menageries of the 18th and 19th centuries, shuttered in so that passers-by got no free view; and as he says (and I saw for myself last year in Yunnan), in China and many emerging economies such horrors are still standard. The history of zoos encapsulates all human attitudes to our fellow creatures: insouciant, expedient, fearful, sentimental but of course capricious, occasionally enlightened but generally foul and, all in all, confused and astonishingly unintelligent. We can learn about ourselves by observing animals; and we can learn at least as much by observing our own attitude to animals.

LRB 21 June 2001 | PDF Download