The World as a Zoo: Managing and Controlling Wild Animals – 19th Century to the Present

Zoos are microcosms whose history opens windows onto key elements in wildlife management: the acceleration of the commodification of animals, the construction and consumption of exoticism, and the development of colonial and international wildlife-conservation policies and programs. Zoological gardens have reflected and co-constructed associated dynamics of extraction, control, and protection, which are impossible to tease apart. 

Illustration 1: View of the Jardin des Plantes menagerie during the Restauration. Drawing by Gaëtan Cathelineau, 1821.
Illustration 1: View of the Jardin des Plantes menagerie during the Restauration. Drawing by Gaëtan Cathelineau, 1821. Source : BnF/Gallica.
Illustration 2: A male okapi captured in the forest near Epulu, Belgian Congo, held captive in Leopoldville Zoo on November 6, 1947, accompanied by the hunting officer Jean de Medina, in charge of official capture of protected animals in the Belgian Congo. SPF Foreign Affairs, Brussels, AA, AGRI 441, 63 Ch. © Photo Congopresse, H. Goldstein.
Illustration 2: A male okapi captured in the forest near Epulu, Belgian Congo, held captive in Leopoldville Zoo on November 6, 1947, accompanied by the hunting officer Jean de Medina, in charge of official capture of protected animals in the Belgian Congo. SPF Foreign Affairs, Brussels, AA, AGRI 441, 63 Ch. © Photo Congopresse, H. Goldstein.
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Nineteenth-century Europe’s economic development went hand in hand with a downturn in wild animals. Many animal populations decreased under the combined effects of change in land use, hunting, and deliberate exterminations (e.g. otters, bears and wolves). Imperial and colonial policies amplified these depredations: 19th-century colonial conquests in Africa were largely based on the mobilization of animals, which were turned into digestible resources, like meat, or marketable ones, like ivory, while land transformations completed the reconfiguration of historical human and animal geographies.

The history of European wildlife management centers, such as natural history museums and zoos, sheds light on the recomposition at work in wildlife management by revealing the broad orientations of the appropriation and conservation policies they were co-constructing. Following the founding of the Jardin des Plantes menagerie in Paris (1793), zoos proliferated in many European metropolises (London, 1828; Dublin, 1831; Bristol, 1835; Manchester, 1836; Amsterdam, 1838; etc.). These institutions were at once driving forces behind, reflections of, and deterrents to the intensification of exploitation of both animals and environments. 

Circa 1793-Circa 1900: Inventorizing the World and Extracting Resources

The first zoos were designed as refuges from a disenchanted world. At the Jardin des Plantes menagerie, the animals, ideally presented in parks – although cages soon came to dominate – were meant to provide crowds of spectators with images of freedom and to participate in building Republican ideals. In London, zoological gardens appeared as a refuge from urban chaos and pollution. But zoos, like botanical gardens and natural-history museums, were cogs in the wheel of a taxonomic enterprise of inventorying and imposing order on the world. “Collecting the world” (M.-N. Bourguet) was based on a massive appropriation of animals killed before they were hoarded in museums, or captured alive but often at the price of culling before being displayed in zoos. Filling cages in order to meet zoos’ diverse purposes – scientific as well as acclimatory, educational and recreational – required dense networks that benefitted first from imperial expansion and then colonial occupations. 

In colonial lands, capturing animals relied most often on earlier appropriation networks. So the large-scale exploitation of ivory carried out in Central and Eastern Africa in the latter half of the 19th century by African chiefs and entrepreneurs as well as autocratic empires (Msiri, Tippo Tip, etc.), which depended on slavery, also acted as a stepping stone to the industrial extraction conducted by colonial powers. The latter cannibalized the former’s networks, remodeling and redirecting them for their own benefit. Displaying animals in European metropolises – a practice that was related to the development of a taste for exoticism and turning the “other” into a spectacle – created, on the other hand, largely new demand. But the predations associated with that practice were also founded on the mobilization of the work force and expertise of neighboring populations, whether through coercion or collaboration. In any case, they resulted in the asymmetrical sharing of benefits that is characteristic of environmental predations in colonial states. The rise in imports of both living and dead animals into Europe was enabled and encouraged by ‘tools of empires’ (Headrick) such as improved firearms, railways, steamboats, telegraph etc., as well as by the development of international commerce. 

Circa 1900-Circa 1960: Colonial Depletions and Conservationist Measures

The pace of colonial extractions carried out on the African continent soon began to raise concern about the possibility of exhausting resources. In 1900, fifteen years after the Berlin Conference of 1885, colonial powers gathered in London to sign the London Convention for the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa. It established a management framework subsequently applied legally in most colonial states. It was based on three objectives: protection of species, i.e. taxonomic categories, rather than animals; protection of spaces, with the creation of reserves and, beginning in the interwar period, national parks; and the taming and breeding of wild animals, which aimed to protect animals by making them useful, alive. The point of those measures was less to preserve animals for their own sake than to protect colonial uses of them by wielding tighter control over appropriation practices, which formalized the exclusion of many African uses and hunting practices. Zoo cages and museum display cases bore witness to those redistributions, presenting to their crowds of visitors individuals of species whose appropriation was banned, like okapis and gorillas, thanks to the granting of multiple legal exceptions. Those animals had to express, first of all, by synecdoche, the breadth of colonial conquests; and then, by dissimulating the capture procedures, based on a deadly economy, the work being carried out to dominate, protect and properly manage wildlife. All in all, the various means of appropriation of wild animals, whether legal or illegal, caused numerous declines in wildlife populations that led to disillusioned assessments of the disappearance of game animals, even by the colonial authorities themselves.

Circa 1960 to the Present Day: Regulating Excesses

Decolonization did not cause the globalized flow of animals to dry up. During the post-war boom years (until about 1975), the importation of living creatures into Europe, based in particular on the development of commercial aviation, was done essentially to supply animal dealers and medical experimentation. In 1952, the level of imports was such that the British Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals opened a facility at London’s Heathrow Airport to tend to animals before they were shipped to their next destination. Twenty-five years later, it had provided care for over 16 million individual animals at that one point of entrance alone. 

Under the aegis of international conservation organizations (IUPN/IUCN, 1948, WWF, 1961), and with the support of African political elites, the main approaches to wildlife conservation that were defined in London in 1900 have been reinforced and globalized, and the management of wildlife has been scientifically refined. New international legal tools, like the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (1975), aim, in the wake of the London Convention, not to prevent the extraction and sale of wild animals, but to regulate it. Then, faced with resigned assessments of mass extinction events, conservationist action has been increasingly aimed at the development of nature reserves and at intensive or even invasive management programs such as confinement in reserves, animal tracking, translocations, culling, captive breeding etc. European zoos reflect and incarnate the growth of that science-focused, interventionist approach. Having instigated captive-breeding programs in the 1960s as a response to rising criticisms of captivity, and the dreaded exhaustion of (post)-colonial supply sources, they have become cardinal players in international conservationism. 

Translated by Regan Kramer

To quote from this article

Violette Pouillard , « The World as a Zoo: Managing and Controlling Wild Animals – 19th Century to the Present », Encyclopédie d'histoire numérique de l'Europe [online], ISSN 2677-6588, published on 19/11/24 , consulted on 19/02/2025. Permalink : https://ehne.fr/en/node/21856

Bibliography

Adams, William M., Against Extinction. The Story of Conservation (London: Earthscan/Fauna & Flora International, 2004).

Gissibl, Bernhard, Höhler, Sabine, Kupper, Patrick (eds), Civilizing Nature. National Parks in Global Historical Perspective (New York/Oxford: Berghahn, 2012).

Pouillard, Violette, Histoire des zoos par les animaux. Impérialisme, contrôle, conservation (Ceyzérieu: Champ Vallon, 2019). [review]

Ross, Corey, Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire. Europe and the Transformation of the Tropical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Rothfels, Nigel, Savages and Beasts. The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

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