Zoos! Feed Drop: Secretly Incredibly Fascinating

A feed drop from the Secretly Incredibly Fascinating podcast, with me and Alex Schmidt! On this very Creaturey-featurey episode, we talk about the history of zoos, and tons of cool zoo facts! Baby pygmy hippos definitely mentioned! 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Zus No four animals, famous for getting to visit the
animals at the zoo. Nobody thinks much about them, So
let's have some fun. Let's find out why sus are
secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey, they're folks, Welcome to a whole

(00:36):
new podcast episode of podcasts all about why being alive
is more interesting than people think it is. My name
is Alex Schmidt, and folks, not only am I not alone,
I'm joined by my co host, Katie Golden.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
Katie, Alex, Hey, good to.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
See you boy.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
Yeah, it's good to see it too.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
I'm glad you're back from your break.

Speaker 3 (00:55):
Me too.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
And I am also so glad people picked such a
wonderful topic friend episode. Thank you to Koop Bear with
support from lots of folks. Katie, what's your relationship to
or opinion of zoos. You don't think about animals, You
probably haven't heard of them or anything.

Speaker 3 (01:10):
I grew up in San Diego, so I went to
one of the world's most famous zoos quite a bit
when I was growing up as an adult, the San
Diego Zoo. Yeah, and I also because I host a
animal podcast, a creature feature, I get asked a lot
what my opinion is on zoos. It really comes down

(01:32):
to the zoos because some zoos are basically animal prisons.
They're not very good. They don't have adequate space for animals,
and so a lot of like roadside zoos are terrible.
You just can't like put a wild animal in a
small cage and call it a day, and I don't
see any value to that. Zoos like the San Diego

(01:53):
Zoo and other zoos, there are plenty all across the
US and the world that do have adequate housing and
care for their animals. I think are actually really important.
They both do a lot of things like practically in
terms of conservation and also in terms of education for
the public. So I'm very much pro good zoo. I

(02:17):
think there are a few animals that just can never
realistically be kept in a zoo. One of them is elephants.
They're just too big and they're too smart, and their
whole life is nomadic. It's not ideal to have elephants
at a zoo. I know some zoos have elephants because

(02:38):
they're rescued, and I understand that, and I think that's fine,
But I don't think elephants should ever be bred in
a zoo. You don't find them much in zoos, But
another one is Orca's. It's the same situations situation as Wales.
They're too big, they're too intelligent in their lives revolved
too much around nomadic lifestyle that a zoo cannot provide.

(03:02):
They're highly social. Yeah, I don't know if any zoo
that has orc is. I know that like Sea World
of course infamously had them. So anyways, I would be against, say,
breeding them and trying purposefully to keep them bred in
a zoo. There are some animals that it's good they

(03:23):
breed in zoo's, like pandas, because they really need the help.

Speaker 1 (03:29):
Oh those goofy little giant fuzzballs a.

Speaker 3 (03:33):
Bunch of voluntary seliments.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
I feel like this topic is really aimed for both
of us, because, Yeah, you make your wonderful podcast creature
feature you grew up near what it turns out is
the most visited and as I understand it, by acclaim
top zuo in the US San Diego Zoo, and then
I've talked about being a zoo tour guide at Brookfield
Zoo and near it's Brookfield, Illinois, it's near Chicago. I'm

(03:59):
pretty in the tank for zoos. I'm pretty biased towards zoos.
And I also I was saying this some by in
discord too, like when people say it's sort of like
an animal jail, they're right, it's just I think it's
worth it. So yeah, it's my like they are stuck
and it's hard to rewild most of them. And then
also I think it's worthwhile overall, but it's like.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
A Nordic animal jail for good zoos. I'm not a
US carceral system.

Speaker 1 (04:26):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like my grammishment would get us
a Brookfield Zoo membership every Christmas for the family, and
then my mom would take me and my brother there
so we run around and wear ourselves out. Then I
dreamed of being a tour guide. Then it was a
tour guide. Me and my wife have gone to a
zoo most every Thanksgiving our whole relationship. Like zoos, I
have like too many zoo associations, and we'll just get

(04:46):
into it, I think as we go. I love them.

Speaker 3 (04:49):
I've never been to the Brookfield Zoo, but I have
seen sort of like the general layout all of this stuff.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
It looks like a.

Speaker 3 (04:55):
Good zoo to me. It seems like they have all
the stuff, like really just there are some zoos that
are just like, here's a cage with a tiger in it,
and it's like, yeah, that's that's no, that's no good.
But when a zoo really tries and cares about the
animals and cares about their welfare, maybe it's not always ideal,

(05:15):
but I don't I don't think it's cruel.

Speaker 1 (05:18):
Thank you again, folks for picking this. I'm sorry scited
to talk about it. On every episode we lead with
a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics in a
segment called Alexeyora stats Man, alexeyorastats Man, Katie yourra stats man,
Do dude, do you keep all your numbers in a

(05:39):
big brown stats inside a zoo? What a stats to do?

Speaker 3 (05:46):
I like how the take on the lyrics to that
song make just about as much sense as the original.
Like the original never made any sense to me. This one,
in a way is even more clear, uh than the
original Beatles song.

Speaker 1 (06:04):
Almost everything on Magical Mystery tours that way. It's great. Yeah,
this is baby, You're a rich man. And thank you
Paul Zorin for that suggestion related to the topic. Thank you, Paul.
We have a new name for this every week. Please
make a mis Silli and waggon bass possible, submit your
discord or to sift Pot at gmail dot com. And
the first number of this week is more than eight thousand,
six hundred species.

Speaker 3 (06:25):
Oh, that is.

Speaker 1 (06:27):
The number of different animal species in zoos and Aquariums
accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which is
mostly a US organization.

Speaker 3 (06:36):
And it's wild because that's a lot wild.

Speaker 1 (06:44):
Yes, it comes back from her summer break thinks I
won't pick out the word wild.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
Yeah, well I thought naively I could just get away
with that. But yeah, that's like a tiny fraction of
the world's species. I would have a lot of. That
is because a lot of zoos do have huge insect exhibits,
which are actually one of my favorite parts of zoos,
the bug house. They're so good, and insects alone are

(07:12):
there's so many species of animals. That's like a tiny fraction,
and that's still a ton of species. That's really impressive.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
It is truly, because this is basically just the US
almost the AZA. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums is
an umbrella organization. It was founded in nineteen twenty four,
and it's not part of the government, it's not required
by any laws. It's just helping two hundred and fifty
one zoos and aquariums in thirteen countries run well on

(07:42):
like a set of voluntary good standards that includes zoos
in forty six US states and the District of Columbia.
And then there's other versions of this organization in other countries.
So if you're in what feels like a professional zoo,
it's probably because of one of these umbrella organizations that
nobody thinks about doing a bunch of good work.

Speaker 3 (08:01):
If there hasn't been like a cage with clearly what
is a man who's naked painted to look like a
tiger going rah, it's probably one of these accredited zoos.

Speaker 1 (08:15):
And if there is that, it's my one man show,
Tiger Elix. It's off off off Broadway and go very
far away. They wouldn't let me.

Speaker 3 (08:24):
I feel like I've probably described someone's fetish and I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
Oh no, I didn't mean it. I really took it
there because I made it me. Uh yeah. And then
the ACA also runs a lot of SSPs. SSPs are
species survival plans. So that's a system of exchanging and
breeding the members of more than five hundred endangered species

(08:49):
in zoos, again just in their group. Then there's as
MP's the Australasian Species Management Program, there's EEPs the European
as a C two programs, there's a bunch of different
umbrella groups. And then also basically logs of family trees
and which animals are where to try to breed endangered

(09:10):
species as well as possible. And again many many thousands
of species are successfully kept in zoos, and also zoos
are skipping a lot of animals that are doing fine
without captivity and are high end numbers in the wild.
So it's an impressive amount.

Speaker 3 (09:26):
Yeah, no, it's I mean, this is kind of one
of the great thing about zoos is that you do
have a repertoire of the animal genome that is being
cared for and protected. It's kind of like a seed bank,
right for plants and stuff. But you can't just keep
animals in suspended animations, so you got to take care

(09:47):
of them, and it's a nice thing that the public
then also gets to see them.

Speaker 1 (09:53):
A next quick number is seven hundred million people. Seven
hundred million people is approximate global old attendance at zoos
and also aquariums. Aquariums are basically just considered a specialized zoo,
so zoo's aquariums, aviaries, everything else.

Speaker 3 (10:08):
How they get that water to stay behind those bars though.

Speaker 1 (10:11):
Alex, that's how they prevent the lion from drowning. It
goes out of the bars and then.

Speaker 3 (10:24):
They keep throwing the fish back in. I love aquariums
as well. Actually, my favorite aquarium is a smaller one
in San Diego associated with UCSD, called the Birch Aquarium.
It's does not have any large whales or dolphins or
anything like that, just a bunch of really cool fish

(10:46):
and a great view of the ocean and like an
artificial tide pool outside that you can like go and
interact with respectfully. They don't want you to grabbing and
shaking the sea here, but it just it's always been
my favorite aquarium. It's not that big, it's just really
well maintained. Since my dad worked at scripts Instituto of Oceanography,

(11:10):
I got to go like all the time. It was amazing.

Speaker 1 (11:13):
I'll bet we both grew up with just such good
aquariums that see, world was never like a consideration, because
Chicago has an excellent one called the Shad Aquarium right
on the lake.

Speaker 3 (11:23):
What was your favorite part of the aquarium anytime?

Speaker 1 (11:28):
I wasn't feeling afraid various phobias, but also sincerely they
had beluga whales. Wow, and they're like neat. And both
Brookfield and the Shad had dolphins and those are cool.

Speaker 3 (11:44):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was.

Speaker 1 (11:46):
I was kind of whiteknuckling the aquarium every time.

Speaker 3 (11:48):
Yeah, man, that was You want to know my favorite
part of the aquarium, Alex, You're not gonna like this. Yeah,
the jellyfish area.

Speaker 1 (11:56):
There was this uh it makes sense. Yeah, like if
you like, there are really cool.

Speaker 3 (12:01):
Yeah, You're in the dark and there's these giant tanks
full of these ethereal otherworldly beings. They had a bunch
of different Nigerians there, so they had like sea gooseberries
that had this sort of like luminescence over their sides
and stuff, and just like beautiful, beautiful surrounded by a
jellyfish in the dark, which I assume is your worst nightmare,

(12:25):
but for me, it was very soothing.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
Yeah. That's like the cut scene for when my character
loses in Mortal Kombat or something. Right, like they're fatalitied
by jellyfish ships it to jellyfish. Hell, this topic is
so common in people's lives, Like it's not that everyone
gets to go. But another number here is one hundred
and eighty one million zoo visitors just in the US

(12:50):
per year. And that's not unique visitors. But if it
was unique visitors, that'd be more than half the US population.
Probably more than a third of Americans go to a
zoo aquarium every year. And despite some of those, except
a few DC ones, being expensive, people still make it happen,
like we just love zoos. The most visited US zoo

(13:11):
is San Diego, the most visited European zoo is apparently Berlin.
The most visited Asian zoo is in Singapore. And also
the Guinness Book of World Records. They're never really a
solid source of information, but for their records they allow
a looser definition of zoos, so they say the world's
most popular zoo is the Animal Kingdom section of Walt

(13:32):
Disney World in Florida, which has like a zookeeping element
and there's animals there. I really I didn't know that
I've been once. There was like a pretty substantial collection
of animals that's like not a ride or whatever. Yeah,
and two next numbers to share kind of back to back.
The two next numbers are twenty two California condors and

(13:54):
only several hundred American bison. Those are the estimated low
points of each of those animal populations, and they are
at least two of the species that have objectively definitely
been saved partly through zoo efforts.

Speaker 3 (14:10):
Yeah. Yeah, which is wild because like I'm gonna keep saying,
and you have to calm down about it, because like
it's it's not like as long as you have a
male animal and a female animal, that population can be saved.
Like it's freaking Noah's arc. Uh that it's usually too
late by that point because the gen that's enough genes, right,

(14:31):
it's too probably not enough. Like if if Noah's arc
was real, like the genetic bottleneck would be so crazy. Yeah,
what was God thinking? Come on, stupid?

Speaker 1 (14:46):
Yeah, but it's almost like it's a metaphor a parable
or something.

Speaker 3 (14:50):
Yeah yeah right now, couldn't be uh, but yeah, the
the uh, you really do need a robust genetic population
for most animals. Some animals can get surprisingly by because
they have weird genetic shenanigans.

Speaker 1 (15:06):
Cough like jellyfish cough, monsters, the monsters.

Speaker 3 (15:10):
Yeah, like asexual reproduction. But it's an incredible feat to
go from like, you know, a few dozen individuals to
actually bringing the population back successfully. Like that's it's hard
to understate how impressive that is.

Speaker 1 (15:27):
Yeah, especially with condors. It's such an amazing story of
especially modern conservation. Apparently in the year nineteen eighty two,
so not long ago. In nineteen eighty two, biologists estimated
that there were only twenty two California condors left and
began bringing as many into zoos as possible and then

(15:47):
bred them, rewilded a bunch of them. There's now hundreds
of them in the wild.

Speaker 3 (15:51):
They managed to avoid the problems with like a human
raising a condor and having the condor and print on
humans by making these amazing condor hand puppets that were
very realistic that they used to feed these baby condors.
Whooping cranes is another example. It's very funny with them
because it's like people with the whooping crane hand puppet,

(16:14):
but then they walk around with sort of a sheet
over the rest of their bodies because they're like they're
like feeding and trying to teach the young whooping cranes stuff,
and so it's very it's very funny, but it's surprisingly effective, and.

Speaker 1 (16:29):
They did it. There's now hundreds of California condors in
the wild. They of course still need support, but without
the efforts of zoos specifically, that wouldn't have happened. And
then much earlier in history, around the eighteen nineties, the
estimate was only several hundred American bison, which was down
from a peak of at least thirty million. Individuals and zoos.

(16:52):
In particular, the Bronxio in New York, working with parks
like wind Cave National Park in South Dakota, came together
to bring back the and so now a lot of
zoological associations in the US the logo might have a
bisoner feature that and yeah, that's another zoo thing. They
also might do a lot of their conservation effort off
the property. My favorite number there because it's a Brookfield thing.

(17:15):
The number is the year nineteen seventy. Back in nineteen seventy,
Brookfield began a research programs studying Atlantic bottlenose dolphins in Florida,
and according to the Chicago Tribune. It is the longest
ongoing study of a wild marine mammal population in the
history of science. They've since the seventies had an ongoing

(17:36):
entire facility and team studying dolphins in Florida, even though
if you're a zoo guest in Chicago, that doesn't entertain
you other than maybe some signs about it, like a
lot of zoos are doing not just behind the scenes,
but thousands of miles away conservation efforts.

Speaker 3 (17:52):
I mean, that's it sounds very similar to museums as well.
Like natural history museums, you're really only seeing a frack
of their collection that's presented throughout the museum. There's so
many other specimens behind the scenes and so much research
that happens behind the scenes. It's equally interesting. But they
just they simply can't just put a researcher on display

(18:14):
going through an archive of thousands of birds. That just
doesn't really work.

Speaker 1 (18:20):
Watch the researcher feeding at noon and then a caper
breaks him subway.

Speaker 3 (18:25):
Yeah, yeah, Like here's your sandwich. Turkey's a little dry.
But like with the dolphin study, I'd be curious here because,
like a lot of the seventies studies on dolphins were
pretty wild, Like do dolphins like jazz? Can we teach
a dolphins to talk? What happens if we stick a

(18:46):
very attractive woman in a hotel room with a dolphin.
None of those are huge exaggerations of real studies they
did with dolphins.

Speaker 1 (18:56):
It'd be funny if the only longitude in the long
term information was about with dolphins like disco and uh,
what dolphins think of Jimmy Carter. You know, it's just
very seventies stuff.

Speaker 3 (19:06):
It'd be really funny. Like we've found out that dolphins
are all staunch Republicans.

Speaker 1 (19:13):
They never heard about Watergate never. Also, they like water,
so you know, right, Therefore it actually another wonderful animal
conservation thing in zoo's is, of course zoo babies. One
exciting number there is November twenty twenty four, this past
November when we're taping. That is when the Edinburgh Zoo

(19:34):
in Scotland trash talked the cow Kiow Open Zoo in Chonburi, Thailand.
Trash talked it because each of them had a baby
pygmy hippo.

Speaker 3 (19:46):
Oh wow, oh my goodness.

Speaker 1 (19:49):
Yeah, And Edinburgh really came for the queen here because.

Speaker 3 (19:53):
Edinburgh who comes from mood Dang.

Speaker 1 (19:56):
Yeah, Edinburgh had a new baby pygmy hippo who they
named Hagis, and they did a social come on, we
did a social media post titled Moodang who Dang introducing Hagis.

Speaker 3 (20:09):
If you want your cute baby hippo to really catch on,
might I suggest basically any other name except Hagis.

Speaker 1 (20:17):
I think I think they were doing the it's so
Scottish and gross, it's cute, but I don't.

Speaker 3 (20:25):
I'm not sold on naming a baby hippo Hagis, you know.

Speaker 1 (20:30):
Yeah. And I also assume Haggas is less popular than
Mudang because I hadn't really heard of Hagas before looking
this up, So I think Mudang won. But also the
kaw kiow Zoo refused to fight. They just replied saying
that both hippos are adorable, and Edinburgh replied with what
they called a notesapp style apology of quote. We were

(20:53):
wrong to pitt Haggis and Moudang against each other.

Speaker 3 (20:57):
I mean it's true, like, why why are we pitting
these hippos against each other? Is Hagas a boy? Uh?

Speaker 1 (21:09):
Oh, it's a girl.

Speaker 3 (21:10):
It's a girl, you know, what this. It's twenty twenty five.
We could still have Julia and Julia with these two hippos.

Speaker 1 (21:18):
Two houses alike Indignity. Scotland and Thailand even have land
in the name, you know, very.

Speaker 3 (21:25):
Similar they do.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
Yeah, this was a rare case of anybody creating any
conflict around zoo babies. Usually just the world is thrilled
with them, one after another. Because of all the things
about social media that are good, the best one might
be easier access to zoo babies. It's great. Yes, one
leader in that was a different hippospecies. In twenty seventeen,

(21:47):
a Nile hippo at the Cincinnati Zoo gave birth to
a baby six weeks prematurely, and the world happily followed
the successful work to get that premi hippo through her
first month and then also enjoyed her activities. Her name
is Fiona. This hippo i've heard of, Fiona is pretty
world famous at the Cincinnati Zoo.

Speaker 3 (22:08):
Baby animals are mostly universally cute. Some of them come
out looking heinously ugly, especially bird babies, but I still
there's something about how ugly they are that is also
cute to me. So I love pretty much any baby animal.

Speaker 1 (22:27):
One prime example of the funny lookingness becoming cute was
a baby penguin recently named Pesto, who was enormous and
had funky feathers.

Speaker 3 (22:36):
I'm aware of Pesto. I've been following Pesto huge.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
So there's a zoo baby for everybody. Go look up
your favorites. It's great. It's just just a joy. I
also want to shout out zoo moms. It's a less
i think, celebrated element, but there are a bunch of
exciting famous zoo moms all over the world. And one
of the first famous ones the year is nineteen ninety

(23:01):
because in nineteen ninety six, a Western Lowland gorilla named
Binti Jua saved the life of a three year old human.
This is one of the Brickfield Zoo stories that was
also world news. They have a gorilla enclosure at their
Tropic World exhibit where guests are pretty far above the animals,
and so a three year old boy fell into it

(23:22):
and was knocked unconscious. Binti Jewah physically shielded him from
any other gorillas until keepers rescued him. And she also
did that while her seventeen month old gorilla baby was
on her back, and so it was like a thrilling
animal motherhood and also protecting a human story for the world.

Speaker 3 (23:42):
Yeah, that's amazing. And to be clear, like the other
gorillas might not have done anything to the toddler because
they were probably really curious, but she probably had some
instinct of like, no, no, this is very delicate, like
because their curiosity could you know, really severely hurt or

(24:04):
even kill a human child. And yeah, it's just delicate,
pretty incredible that not only is there that capacity for
empathy an understanding of the situation, but just the variability
and responses. Right, Like you have these some girls really excited,
maybe they want to play in a way that might
be harmful in this other girl who has maybe the

(24:26):
the awareness or the personality where she understands to keep
the other ones away. It just shows a really remarkable
type of intelligence.

Speaker 1 (24:37):
And yah, we see it in a bunch of different
ways too, in a bunch of other animal species with
their own babies in zoos. And two amazing stories of
that are from this partial year twenty twenty five. One
is that in April twenty twenty five, there was a
five point two magnitude earthquake that shook the San Diego
Zoo Safari Park and the African elephants. The five adults

(25:00):
in the enclosure hurried to form a protective circle. Their
young got in the middle, and I think that was
a known behavior, but people were excited to have footage
of it and in that cool way.

Speaker 3 (25:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:11):
Different story here is from the Philadelphia Zoo in February
twenty twenty five. The two oldest residents of the Philadelphia
Zoo are Galapagos tortoises, a male named Abraso and a
female named Mommy. And ironically Mommy was not a mom
yet until twenty twenty five. She laid sixteen eggs, resulting

(25:33):
in four baby Galapagos tortoises, and she did that at
the approximate age of one hundred. Wow, first time mom
at one hundred.

Speaker 3 (25:43):
They live such a long time, and then the fact
that their fecundity doesn't really go down that much with
age is yeah bonkers.

Speaker 1 (25:52):
Yeah truly. Yeah, And the Smithsonian magazine article says they
usually lived around two hundred, so this is definitely like
middle age and a normal breeding age of one hundred.
And also those tortoises have been in the care of
the Philadelphia's youth since the early nineteen thirties. Wow, so
many generations of human zoo keepers made those babies happen.

(26:12):
It's cool.

Speaker 3 (26:14):
Yeah, I wonder what did it that? Like, Like why
this was the year like you know, finally warmed up
enough to It's like, you know, after like one hundred
years together, I think I can tolerate you enough to
have a baby. It is.

Speaker 1 (26:34):
They're almost like nts or something from Lord of the Rings,
Like the decision making process is very NT moot for
tourtots babies.

Speaker 3 (26:42):
I think, Yeah, it takes them a week to decide
what they want for dinner, and.

Speaker 1 (26:49):
It's leaves, it leaves again, and it always leaves. And
our last number before takeaways. It's the year two thousand
and ninety four BC, so more than four thousand years
ago twenty ninety four BC. That's the oldest record of
a ruler like acquiring animals for a private zoo and

(27:14):
essentially the oldest record of zoo keeping in human history
that we found.

Speaker 3 (27:19):
So where was this?

Speaker 1 (27:21):
And it was a guy named the Great King Shulgia,
who was the ruler of a Sumerian Empire in ancient Mesopotamia.
He was mostly in the city of Or.

Speaker 3 (27:31):
It's really hard for me to respect a king whose
name is Shulgia. I don't know why it doesn't. It
doesn't inspire fear awe, it's just kind of a cute name,
like here comes old King Shulgia.

Speaker 1 (27:45):
Yeah, I'm completely with you. I was not into it
when I read it. I was like, Okay, I guess
he added great to the title of King Jesu that.
One key source this week is the book The Modern Arc,
The Story of Zoo's Past press in Future. That's by
author and NPR journalist Vicki Crok. She says that we

(28:05):
think exotic animal collecting started around five thousand years ago
because we had the conditions of large cities and centralized
governments and wealthy rulers who would assemble that for their
own personal enjoyment. No, like, we think just various civilizations
around the world could do that around five thousand years ago,

(28:26):
and the oldest record of it is clay tablets saying
that shulgiev Or purchased lions and maybe some other species
for his private collection. So we also think lions are
one of the first sioux animals in history.

Speaker 3 (28:41):
I mean, lions seemed to have throughout history this sort
of universal awe inspiring effect on people. Yeah, and like
to the point where people would try to be drawing
them in medieval times in the Middle Ages without having
ever seen one, just making these terrible, terrible drawings of

(29:07):
weird dog looking things.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
And then also before the Colombian Exchange in Europe Asia Africa,
apparently one of the other top zoo animals was giraffes.
And there's a few thousand years of rulers really trying
to get a giraffe. And it started with fourteen ninety
BC the Egyptian pharaoh Queen hat ship sits. This pharaoh queen,
she arranged the first recorded expedition to specifically collect animals

(29:33):
for a private zoo, and we think she brought the
first giraffe to Egypt. And then like jumping, a few
thousand years later, various European countries recorded their first giraffe
to come into their zoo and like massive crowds and
public spectacle about it.

Speaker 3 (29:49):
I mean, I think that's remained the same, right, Giraffes
and lions are probably some of the most popular animals.
Yeah for a zoo, Like when you look at you
look at zoo brochures and things like you're usually seeing
like a tiraffe or a lion on there. If the
zoo has giraffes or lions.

Speaker 1 (30:10):
Yeah, the heights and everything, and yeah, it's just great.
And yeah, so they were spread, you know, the Egyptians,
the Romans, everybody was trying to get giraffes to look
at if they didn't live near them. And we think
pretty much worldwide, Jao Dynasty China and the Triple Alliance Aztecs,
many different rulers were just the only people making zoos.

(30:31):
And another source this week is a book called Zoo,
a History of Zoological Gardens in the West. It's co
written by Eric Brete and Elizabeth Hartwantfouget, who are professors
at a university in Leone, France, and they say that
there's a weird couple thousand years of not just royal
private zoos in various places, but also they would really

(30:53):
rise and fall with the personal interest in animals of
each ruler, right, Like, it's not like the zoo that
your city always has. It's a situation where either a
ruler would inherit a huge zoo and just not be
that big of an animal person and let a lot
of them go, or not inherit a zoo and build
a zoo real fast.

Speaker 3 (31:13):
Yeah. I mean, you're just at that, You're at the
mercy of the whims of your ruler. Maybe you have
a ruler who's like super into u gi O cards
and it's like, no more zoo, We're all into yu
gi o cards now.

Speaker 1 (31:26):
And then their kids, like my dad liked yu gi oh,
I like drafts, and then they get a bunch of drafts,
and then you trade drafts for yugio the next generation.
It's just a cycle, right, you know, draft yu gi oh.

Speaker 3 (31:36):
Yeah, And you as the even as the land of gentry,
just kind of have to sit back and let the
whims of the ruler take precedent.

Speaker 1 (31:47):
Oh, there's been a regime change. Put our ugyo stuff away,
get the draft out. We gotta it's it's it flips
the fat flips man.

Speaker 3 (31:53):
Just get the dust off the get the giraffe out
of the closet, dusted off.

Speaker 1 (31:58):
And yeah, and Barrettsay and Ardwan Fugier, they say that
maybe the most amazing example of this royal fad switching
is the last three major French kings, Louis the fourteenth, fifteenth,
and sixteenth. Because they reigned for nearly one hundred and
fifty years put together, they each had a very long,
many decades reign. Louis the sixteenth was killed by the

(32:21):
French Revolution, otherwise he would have gone longer, right, And
Louis the fourteenth, known as the Sun King. He loved
animals and enthusiastically assembled probably the largest sioux of its
time at Versailles, basically for himself and a few friends. Yeah,
and then Louis the fifteenth was only sort of into it,

(32:41):
and Louis the sixteenth had no interest, basically never went.

Speaker 3 (32:45):
Do you think if Louis the sixteenth had like opened
the zoo up to the public, among other things like
making sure they had enough to eat, I think that
might have given him a pretty good chance of not getting,
you know, his head chopped off, because like if he's like, look, guys,
a free zoo day for the public and also maybe

(33:06):
some food, and then I think, you know, you might
have smoothed things over.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
That is pretty much an argument, Like it wouldn't have
prevented the French Revolution. But it gets us into takeaway
number one. Modern zoos were invented by French revolutionaries in
Paris and a French born emperor in Vienna.

Speaker 3 (33:31):
That's really interesting, I kind of because I was gonna
mention the fact that Versailles like opened up to the
public after the revolution, Like at first they were going
to destroy it out of anger. Yeah, and then some
of them were like, oh wait, hang on, this is
actually pretty sick, Like what if we just made this
basically a big museum for the public to be able

(33:52):
to see? Was that kind of like where like did
they open up the zoo to people? At that point?

Speaker 1 (33:59):
The basically relocated it because also Versilles outside the city,
but they basically put the animals they could gather into
a former royal botanical garden in Paris.

Speaker 3 (34:12):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (34:12):
And that was the basis of the first Paris zoo.

Speaker 3 (34:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:16):
And in a very separate way, a very absolutist and
royal leader accidentally established a public Vienna zoo. And those
are the two key zoos of most modern zoos happening
from there.

Speaker 3 (34:32):
I mean, I'm glad that the revolution sort of like
had the wherewithal not to hold all the animals accountable
for the royals, because like, how would you even get
a giraffe in a guillotine and what like what part
of the neck would you go for?

Speaker 1 (34:49):
Yeah, if a rebel tries to figure out that problem,
they clearly just like cutting people's heads off. It's not ideological.
They're just a serial killer at that point. So this
is the two weirdly separate but also dovetailing stories of
the Paris zo and the Vienna zoo because they both

(35:10):
came out of movements to make zoos for the public, right,
like a zoo should be something that benefits the public,
and the previous nearly four thousand years, zoos were for
a few rich guys or just one rich guy. Yes,
most of politics and society has changed in this direction,
and zoos are an example of it.

Speaker 3 (35:31):
I mean it was like a modern version of it
would be like, uh, what's his name? El Chapo? Right,
like he had a bunch of animals that oh kept around.

Speaker 1 (35:42):
And later in the show, we'll talk about Pablo Escobar
ahead a zoo.

Speaker 3 (35:45):
Ah yeah, Pablo Escobar as well. Yeah, like he had
he had like he's basically his own private zoo.

Speaker 1 (35:53):
Yeah that in a few weird ways remains modern. But yeah,
this basically the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution a
lot to change that, Yeah, really like ethic of zoos
for the public and for science and for conservation, like
a few good things all at once. That is really
from the late seventeen hundreds in Paris and Vienna. And

(36:14):
the separate way it happens in Paris is that there's
a French revolution. Especially if folks heard the recent episode
about the Bass Deal. We describe hunger and also inequality
as to key drivers of the entire French Revolution, and
opening up the zoo wouldn't have prevented the whole revolution
or something. But revolutionaries like the Jacobins specifically held up

(36:37):
Louis the Sixteenth animal Menagerie because the word zoo didn't
exist yet, these were usually called animal menageries.

Speaker 3 (36:44):
They held thee like menagerie as a word a lot.

Speaker 1 (36:47):
It's quite good, yeah, and so French, so you know,
it makes sense for them. They held up Louis the
Sixteenth Menagerie as one of the most disgusting and wasteful
royal things, mainly on the grounds that the animals were
well fed, while most French people starved. Yeah, it was
an inequality thing.

Speaker 3 (37:08):
It's gotta be so frustrating for you to be an
angry French person who can barely feed your family and
you're seeing your own children starve, and then you're hearing about,
you know, some giraffe getting fed macaroons, like that's not
that's not a tenable situation.

Speaker 1 (37:26):
Right right. And also a word got out that Louis
the sixteenth was fully continuing to fund his grandfather and
great grandfather's zoo without any real interest in it. Yeah,
to the point that apparently his courtiers and staff made
a new map of Versailles in seventeen eighty one just
so people like the king could know where everything was,

(37:48):
but he was so uninterested in his zoo they didn't
even put it on the map of his own palace
when it's a zoo just for him. So people were
really mad. They were like, why are you feeding lions
and not humans in this country? The switch that flips
is basically, all of the positives of a zoo are
positive if we make them for everybody instead of just

(38:10):
one rich guy. And so that's how the French co
invented the modern zoo in Paris. The one pushback was
that a lot of the revolutionaries wanted to maintain the
main botanical garden in Paris without letting animals ruin it.
They just worried that like animals would trample the rare plants.
But once they sorted that out, they moved many of

(38:32):
the versimon Agerie animals to the Jaudins duplant, which just
means botanical garden, plant garden. They turned what was a
waste of royal wealth into a pillar of public good.
They said, this demonstrates France's global influence. It's for public education,
it's for edification, it's for entertainment. And within a couple

(38:56):
of years, the French revolutionaries were using their military partly
to gather new animals for their new zoo in the
middle of Paris.

Speaker 3 (39:04):
Wow, that's I mean, they must have really freaking loved
those animals.

Speaker 1 (39:09):
They were really big fans. Yeah, and apparently they ate
a few of them. And also but the ones that
they could move easily they moved.

Speaker 3 (39:18):
They were very hungry. They were very hungry. Yeah, to
be fair, they did not have cake, which was Mary
Antoinette's fatal mistake.

Speaker 1 (39:31):
And yeah, and then separately, because it's totally monarchical, but
otherwise for similar reasons, the Archduke of Austria and Holy
Roman Emperor in Vienna sort of accidentally started a public
zoo before the French did.

Speaker 3 (39:47):
Yeah, it was.

Speaker 1 (39:48):
Initially a new menagerie, but it was set up by
a guy named Franz Stephen who was initially just born
as the Duke of Lorraine. It's a French and sort
of Germanic. But he married his second cousin, who was
Maria Teresa.

Speaker 3 (40:05):
They did that all the time back then. Guys. Everyone
calm down right.

Speaker 1 (40:10):
Like second instead of first is pretty good for the
seventeen hundreds.

Speaker 3 (40:13):
Yeah, it's pretty good. That's like kim a little far
afield of the family bloodline there.

Speaker 1 (40:20):
Yeah, starting to fork the tree. Great, but he so
he married into an incredibly powerful royal line then got
to be sort of the main person, partly through patriarchy.
So Franz Stephan, this Frenchish nobleman, is suddenly Archduke of
Austria and the Holy Roman Emperor, and he's living in
Europe's second biggest palace after Versailles. It's called shun Brun.

(40:43):
It's in Vienna. And this is seventeen fifty two. So
he is an absolute monarch of a huge amount of Europe,
and he says, I really like animals. I'm building a
zoo for myself. But unlike a lot of other menageries,
Franz Stephan's next couple heirs not only kept it up
but also subscribed to a philosophy called enlightened absolutism. Interesting,

(41:07):
go on, It's the goal is basically, what if all
of our dictators were just perfect people? Right, Like, what
if they were just incredibly generous and we just get
lucky every time?

Speaker 3 (41:20):
I mean, that would be great.

Speaker 1 (41:21):
Yeah, his heirs as soon as the seventeen seventies start
allowing a few hours of public visitors to their animal collection.
If the visitors wear formal clothing. You know, it was
like extraordinary limited just for the rich zoo visiting. And
it is a zoo to this day. The former menagerie

(41:44):
of schunbren Palace pretty seamlessly morphed into being a public
Vienna zoo. Right, and when you look at the zoo
map you can tell it used to be a Versailles
type garden.

Speaker 3 (41:55):
Yeah. And just for the record, these Vienna guys, they
didn't get their heads chopped.

Speaker 1 (41:59):
Off they did not.

Speaker 3 (42:01):
Yeah yeah, well see yeah, give the people a zoo,
probably food too. That's I feel like I'd be a
very good, enlightened absolutist because I'd be like, first of all,
we should be giving people cake. I think they'd be
super into that, and then also a zoo, and you know,

(42:25):
that's my pitch to be voted empress.

Speaker 1 (42:29):
It was basically two completely different governments with the same
theoretical ideals. The French Revolution was liberty, agality, fraternity, and
the Austrian Archduke was I have all of the power
and I will do liberty, agality, fraternity for you guys,
except that you never get any power, and so you.

Speaker 3 (42:49):
Know, yeah, I promise to be good. I promise I'll
be really good.

Speaker 1 (42:56):
Yeah. And also not really egalitarian anything, because we're still
having nobility and stuff.

Speaker 3 (43:01):
Yeh yeah, yeah, yeah, so I'll be good to you know,
the top like ten percent of you.

Speaker 1 (43:08):
But both those from separate routes. Enlightenment driven zoos in
Paris and Vienna templated a lot of the rest of
the worlds, like you have waves of zoo building in England,
the Netherlands, Belgium, German speaking places. Later the US after
the Civil War there, and especially the layout of zoos.
A lot of zoos have like big broad paths and

(43:30):
lots of wonderful plants too. That's specifically inspired by the
Paris Zoo and the Vienna Zoo both being built in
royal gardens and like imitating that shape and that landscaping.
And that also led to the word zoo because instead
of calling them menageries, they called them zoological gardens or
zoological parks because it's the science of zoology. Plus what's

(43:53):
obviously a garden or park because it was recently, and
then we shortened that to zoo, but that's where the
word comes from.

Speaker 3 (44:00):
Yeah, Paris and Vienna botanical gardens, if it's a good one,
those are awesome. I love them so much.

Speaker 1 (44:07):
They're really good.

Speaker 3 (44:08):
Like when I was a kid, they sounded so boring
as a kid, but then you go and you're surrounded
by the weirdest, funkiest plants.

Speaker 1 (44:15):
I felt the same. Yeah, I'm only starting to appreciate
them now. I was walked through the sullenly before. Yeah. Yeah,
it really only took about one hundred and fifty years
for zoos to go from the private menagerie of one
royal to a public institution for public good, especially because

(44:36):
rich people funded a lot of them initially and then
didn't want to keep it up. The Paris and Vienna
origins are sort of unique and more common. Thing happened
in London in eighteen twenty two. Rich people and upper
middle class people in London created the Zoological Club of
the Linnaean Society and they founded a London zoo, but

(44:57):
also made it exclusive to the members of the society
who paid before it. Right for about a century early
eighteen hundreds into the early nineteen hundreds, a lot of
zoos were either from a philanthropic club or a like
joint stock company basically a corporation that would restrict it
to just the people who paid for it, But then
their kids and grandkids and great grandkids didn't want to

(45:18):
keep paying for it, and then those zoos basically got
transition to public governments, and then public governments doubled down
the focus of science and education and the other positive
things like it became seen as a pillar like libraries
and museums of society.

Speaker 3 (45:35):
Yeah, so it's like they probably started out just a
bunch of top hat wearing guys going around, yeah, poking
tigers with their ostentatious canes. And then you know, now,
now it's a lot better.

Speaker 1 (45:50):
Yeah, and it's a middle set that kind of made
some sense. Zoo membership now is just your family gets one,
but before it was I'm a member of the zoo
because I pay for it like a GM or something.
You know, right right there just weren't enough descendants of
those rich people who wanted to keep feeding the lions personally,
all on their own, and then it became public and
that has influenced every listener's experience of zoos Paris Fianna

(46:14):
and then the progression from there.

Speaker 3 (46:16):
Right because they were still modeled after what those original
zoos were like exactly.

Speaker 1 (46:22):
Yeah, and folks, this is a mega takeaway and so
many numbers and zoos were going to come back with
a few more short takeaways. After a quick break, folks,
we're back and we have two further takeaways about zoos.
They're also going to be, I would say, much stranger
than the previous chunk of the show. The first one
is takeaway number two. One Guy in Hamburg, Germany established

(46:49):
the worst ever concept for a zoo and separately established
one of the best ideas for zookeeping.

Speaker 3 (46:56):
All right, let me guess underwater zoo and then best idea,
all the animals get little hats.

Speaker 1 (47:07):
What you said underwaters you I thought about like the
glass that you watched the polar bears and dolphins through
in the water. I was like, what's the bad idea?
What's the bad idea? Right right, right now? The ideas
are even better and even worse. And this is the
story of Carl hagen Beck.

Speaker 3 (47:23):
That's the name.

Speaker 1 (47:24):
No one knows his name, but Carl hagen Beck almost
made zoos a major crime against humanity and then also
improve them in a way that most of us enjoy
to this day. And I want to be clear that
both those ideas happened separately, Like we didn't need the
bad thing for the good thing. The bad thing was
just bad. Oh oh, the bad thing was human zoos.

(47:44):
He exhibited ethnicities of people to white Europeans.

Speaker 3 (47:49):
I was afraid this was coming. Yeah, I've actually I've
read a little bit about this. That's a oh boy. Anyways,
continue Alex.

Speaker 1 (47:59):
Yeah, it's like important and we'll just lay out what
it is. And then his completely separate good idea. People
call it stuff like the Hagenback Revolution, like it truly
changed zoo keeping. The short version of it is. Until
relatively recently, like into the early nineteen hundreds, most zoos
just displayed their animals inside of small metal cages like

(48:22):
metal bars.

Speaker 3 (48:23):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (48:24):
Yeah, And Hagenbeck's idea was one of the main features
is what's called architectural ditches, which is where you give
your animal a big open space. You know, maybe they
want more space, because many animals do, but it's a
big open space, and then the separation between you and
them is a moat or an open space, like just

(48:44):
a big gap that they can't cross right, And then
it's better for everybody involved. It's improved every zoo ever.

Speaker 3 (48:52):
Yes, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 (48:54):
And he just had both those ideas separately and is
kind of the worst and best person and in the
history of modern zeus. Yeah, but really just the worst.
I think somebody else could have come up with the ditches.

Speaker 3 (49:06):
I feel like that was an inevitable innovation.

Speaker 1 (49:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (49:11):
And I hear and the butt is coming and it
is a very large butt.

Speaker 1 (49:16):
And Carl Hagenbeck also bothered to innovate zoos because he's
one of the first people ever to inherit a zoo
without being royalty. His dad was in the zoo business,
and they were not wealthy people. Carl Hagenbeck was born
in eighteen forty four in Hamburg. His father was both
a fishmonger and an animal enthusiast. A fishmonger sells fish,

(49:39):
they don't catch the fish. And one day some fishermen
gave Klaus Hagenbeck some live seals that just got caught
and trapped in their nets. And Klaus already owned a
few other exotic pets, and so he built wooden tubs
for the seals, a few other displays for other animals,
and charged people one shilling to look at.

Speaker 3 (49:57):
It, one shilling CCO, one shilling CEO.

Speaker 1 (50:02):
Yeah. And this was the eighteen fifties, so like Paris
and Vienna and a few cities have modern issu zues,
but this major German city of Hamburg did not yet.
So Klaus was filling the vacuum with like an amateur
fly by night zoo.

Speaker 3 (50:19):
So he was like, he was like seal king.

Speaker 1 (50:22):
Yeah, seal king basically yeah. And then in eighteen fifty
nine he takes his fourteen year old son Carl and says,
you're not going to school. You now run a zoo.

Speaker 3 (50:32):
You know how excited I would have been to hear
those words when I was a kid. I know, I
dream I dreamed of hearing that all the time. You
know what, No more school, You run a zoo now.

Speaker 1 (50:44):
Yes. And so then Carl is like a zoo small businessman.
He really needs the zoo to keep making money, otherwise
he'll go broken. It all folds and there's a German
economic downturn in the eighteen seventies, and then he commits
a crime against humanity. To try to solve it, he
starts a human zoo. Yeah, and if folks have heard

(51:05):
the passive episode about world's fairs, we talk about some
world's fairs also doing that for what they thought were
positive scientific principles of eugenics. And so in Hamburg, Carl
Hagenbeck puts up really the first ever human zoo in
eighteen seventy five. Yeah, it's an exhibit of two families

(51:26):
of indigenous Sami people from Scandinavia along with tools, sleds, dogs,
and thirty one reindeer. And like the public would watch
them milk the reindeer at specific times. And this was
a massive hit and then he made more exhibits of
more ethnicities.

Speaker 3 (51:43):
So this was like, to be clear, like this was
separate from slavery, right, like were these people enslaved or
were they sort of this was more sort of like
economic coercion.

Speaker 1 (51:59):
Great question, and it's a mix of economic coercion, and
apparently a few of the participants are considered to have
been like actively into it, like this is better pay
than I'd ever make, but that's still coercion to me.
Being kept in an exhibit doesn't seem like anyone was
captured quite But he did various exhibits of people. Apparently,

(52:19):
one featuring Sudanese people was such a hit that drew
sixty two thousand spectators in one day. He also failed
to vaccinate or protect these people from European diseases, and
so many of the exhibit people died. Oh boy, it's
just horrible. Yeah, oh my god.

Speaker 3 (52:37):
It's like maybe he was taking better care of the
animals than the people at that point, because Jesus like.

Speaker 1 (52:44):
Yeah, potentially, yeah yeah. And this also to society's credit,
this got pushed back from jump Like even the very
first exhibit, people said that's weird, like this is racist
and negatives. Yeah, but not enough people said that, and
so crowds came.

Speaker 3 (53:00):
Like that is typically like when you hear about and
a thing that is atrocious from the past, particularly when
it relates to like race, there usually are contemporaries who
are like, this is messed up, who were just simply ignored.

Speaker 1 (53:14):
Yeah, yeah, and so and then Hagenbeck kicked this off
as a trend in zoos and World's fairs for about
thirty years. That the end came in the early nineteen
hundreds and was also the all time low point in
US zoo history because at the nineteen oh four World's
Fair there was an exhibit of a man named Ota

(53:35):
Benga from Central Africa, and then two years later the
Bronx Zoo tried exhibiting him, and according to the Smithsonian,
this experiment was halted following complaints and remains an isolated case.
So that that's the all time low point in American
zoo history is that, you know, like a guy named
William Hornaday, who did a lot to save the bison,

(53:56):
also exhibited Ode Benga in a zoo and that was
part of the history of it.

Speaker 3 (54:01):
Well because probably in a sick way, right like the
same kind of like care and the idea of like
animal husbandry can extend to human beings if you don't
see them as the same as yourself, right, Like it's
the paternalistic I must be sort of the father of

(54:25):
the land and the caretaker of the land can extend
to people if you don't really see them as people.

Speaker 1 (54:32):
A hundred percent that was their thinking. And yeah, some
of these World's Fair people especially were proud. They were like,
look at what we're showing and educating people about race,
and they were just wrong about race. And yeah, and
then hagen Beck received that message in his own time,
and especially toward the end of his exhibits going truly poorly,
totally separately, he tries to improve the keeping of animals

(54:54):
and zeos and does so. And one thing he did
is helped to lead the trend toward gathering animals by
ecosystem rather than by taxonomy. Like instead of building a
reptile house, you build an exhibit of animals in a place,
including the reptiles there, and an exhibit of another ecosystem
including the reptiles and so on. Yeah, which is the

(55:16):
logic of a lot of zoos today. Like Brookfield they
had an old reptile house because that's old, and then
their new exhibits were environments. That's an ongoing trend.

Speaker 3 (55:26):
I think that's generally the structure of the San Diego Zoo,
except for insects because that's kind of hard.

Speaker 1 (55:33):
Yeah, the size to.

Speaker 3 (55:34):
Integrate the insects, it's a normal I mean, they're there,
but you can't see him.

Speaker 1 (55:39):
Oh in Brookfield had a small mammal house, which was awesome.
It's so good, but it's the size. Yeah, just making
exhibits work better. Hagenbeck did that four animals, and he
became so committed to a whole new way of zoo
keeping that in the early nineteen hundreds he constructed a
whole new zoo next to his previous zoo, and he

(55:59):
hoped and Tierpark Hagenbeck in nineteen oh seven Tierpark means
animal park, and it blew the world's mind with the
first architectural ditches and open instead of cage exhibits for
mostly the larger non predator animals. Initially, he also built
a larger version of it a few years later, called
the Panorama Zoo. That the entire hook was there's not

(56:22):
bars between you and the animals and the animals have
at least a little more space, and that spread worldwide
within a couple decades. It's a huge head idea. It's
influenced every zoo you've ever been to.

Speaker 3 (56:33):
I mean, in addition to that being much better for
the animals, it's a much more exciting experience for the person,
right because you get to see them doing stuff and
if not their natural environment, at least a facsimile of it.

Speaker 2 (56:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:47):
Really, it's simply great all around. And Carl Hagenbeck is
an extraordinarily complicated person to have had that great innovation
and spread it worldwide, just separately from doing horrible things.

Speaker 3 (57:02):
Yeah. So it seems to be a pretty common theme
throughout history, Like, ah, this guy did something really cool.

Speaker 1 (57:09):
He hated women, though, and he's also a case of
society doing a good job pushing back against his bad
idea and running with his good idea. It's good that
people all over the world shaped what he tried to
do in a positive direction all around. Yeah, so, good

(57:30):
job everybody. Good job protesting at the Bronx Zoo and
so on when they tried to display a person.

Speaker 3 (57:35):
Good job for rejecting the idea human zoo. Yes, it's
a low bar. It's a very low bar, but we
managed to get over it.

Speaker 1 (57:46):
And yeah, and then our last takeaway about a completely
different weird thing takeaway number three, the private zoos of
Pablo Escobar and William Randolph Hurst accidentally established hippo and
zebra populations in the Americas.

Speaker 3 (58:05):
Oh whoa. I was aware that Hurst had weird animals
around his very strange estate and that a lot of
them had kind of escaped.

Speaker 1 (58:18):
Yeah, and it's left a population of more than one
hundred zebras near Highway one on the central coast of California.
That's wow, they're doing their thing out there. And then
there's more than one hundred hippopotamuses in Colombia because of
the narco terrorist and drug lord Pablo Escobar keeping hippos

(58:40):
and then letting them get out. And like in the
numbers in the beginning we talked about ancient private zoos,
royal private zoos. This is a way that modern weird,
rich kai private zoos can.

Speaker 3 (58:50):
Go that desire that rich people have, or even just
eccentric people with enough money like Tiger King to be like,
you know what, I just want to have some chunk
of exotic nature.

Speaker 1 (59:07):
For me, right, yeah, yeah, and it gets so weird
and can get weird in different ways of making money.
William Randolph Hurst is media titan Pablo Escobar adult drugs.
Escobar was based in Mediine amassed tens of billions of dollars.
He's arguably the wealthiest criminal in human history. But one
weird indicator of his wealth is one of his employees.

(59:31):
In twenty twenty five, The Guardian interviewed Tirso Dominguez, who
was one of his former airplane pilots and just being
one of Escobar's airplane pilots, Dimingaz claims to have owned
thirty Lamborghinis wow, and each day when he put on
his shirt, he would then select the car that matched
the shirt to drive around. So anyway, Escobar truly outrageous wealth.

(59:57):
And one thing he did is at his estate is
set up a private zoo and then also later in
his run of crime, he opened it to the public
to try to gain favor with ordinary Colombians against the authorities,
Like this is my whole thing.

Speaker 3 (01:00:11):
Right if you don't want to, if you're really rich
and powerful and you don't want to get got you
got to give people a.

Speaker 1 (01:00:18):
Zoo, right, right, and like Hearst never really did that
because Hurst had the government on his side, partly by
almost controlling the government in the United States. Right. So
it's it's very different.

Speaker 3 (01:00:29):
Yeah, have you been to the Hearst Castle in it
it's I've been. It's very strange. It's like a bunch
of different styles of architecture all mashed together, just a
bunch of like weird opulence. I wouldn't say it's nice looking.
It's just kind of a bit of lunacy, a bit

(01:00:52):
of rich lunacy, where it's very gaudy, very very strange.
I think that was actually the only time I believe
I saw a condor on the drive up to it.

Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
That makes sense because apparently people see lots of interesting
wildlife in the area of Hurst Castle. It's a relatively
remote part of California there. Yeah, back to Escobar quick
he gathered every exotic animal he could think of, But
he also had a basically principle of large predators are
too hard to keep, too much meat, too much security,

(01:01:28):
which might be smart, I don't know, yes, But so
then he kept every large herbivore or won't eat a
human that he could think of. He had zebras, giraffes, kangaroos, rhinoceroses, elephants, ostriches,
and a set of four nile hippopotamuses.

Speaker 3 (01:01:44):
I mean, a hippo, while not perhaps consuming the human,
will certainly tear a human apart given the chance.

Speaker 1 (01:01:54):
That seems to be part of the problem, because then Escobar,
eventually he's killed by his enemies and the authorities. His
estate falls into ruin. But there's this huge five year
period where the estate is not controlled by Escobar because
he's dead, but also nobody's watching the animals closely, and

(01:02:14):
the least approachable controllable animal he happened to gather was hippos.
And during those five years, his four hippos took over
an artificial pond reproduced in it. And then that hippo
population just got out, trampled farms, menaced people, and those
hippos have exploded into a population of at least several dozen,

(01:02:35):
possibly more than two hundred. The New York Times cites
experts who claim that by twenty thirty five of the
country of Columbia might have more than a thousand hippos,
all from this tiny four hippo gene pool from Pablo
Escobar Zoo.

Speaker 3 (01:02:50):
It's so funny because invasive species are very common, but
a hippo is like, it's the funniest invasive species because
it's like it's not good like they are. It's it's
not a good thing to just have wandering around. Its bad. Yeah,

(01:03:11):
I'm sure they have an impact on the environment, but
also they're just high, they're so aggressive, and they're enormous.

Speaker 1 (01:03:18):
That's kind of the all around way people feel in
Colombia today, apparently because they're definitely an ecological menace. They
devour too much plant life and then their feceson water
spreads harmful bacteria and algae because it feeds on it.
And in twenty twenty three, the government proposed sterilizing as
much of the herd as possible to like wind it

(01:03:39):
down that way.

Speaker 3 (01:03:40):
Right, good, like getting cloked, Like what are you gonna do?
Oh all right, it's your job now to castrate this hippo.
Good freaking luck.

Speaker 1 (01:03:49):
And apparently they have not begun because it's hard. The
plan was to put like, of course it's hard. Their
stated plan was to put caches of vegetables in big
pad and then let veterinarians sterilize the hippos from there,
but come on, this is not gonna work.

Speaker 3 (01:04:05):
Come on.

Speaker 1 (01:04:08):
And then, also, because hippos are basically funny and interesting,
they're sort of a favorite local symbol. In many places
in Colombia, there's statues of hippos, and Escobar's former property
is now a place people visit for fun. There's a
little bit of a theme park, and that includes a
giant pink mascot hippo named Vanessa okay, who like greets

(01:04:29):
guests to Escabar's former estate. Well, so his weird zoo
made Colombia a hippo country. There's no endemic hippos in
the Americas, No.

Speaker 3 (01:04:39):
I mean, once your country's been taken over by hippos,
you do kind of have to embrace it.

Speaker 1 (01:04:44):
I guess that's kind of what people are saying. Yeah,
they're like, I don't know, this is just part of
the deal now. But it seems unsustainable.

Speaker 3 (01:04:51):
Too, you like, when the hippos come, it's just like
you just got to accept it.

Speaker 1 (01:04:59):
Yeah, And in a separate way, that's happened with Zebras
on the central coast of California. There are no endemic
Zebras in North America.

Speaker 3 (01:05:07):
Yeah, no, no kidding.

Speaker 1 (01:05:09):
William Randolph Hurst. The pop culture touchstone is Citizen Kane.
That movie by Orson Wells is a fictionalization of Hurst,
right basically, an incredibly wealthy and sad newspaper titan who
was also specifically known for sloppy and scandalous journalistic practices.
His newspapers are a major reason, maybe the reason, the

(01:05:31):
United States declared war on Spain in eighteen ninety eight
and seized colonial territories from Puerto Rico to the Philippines.
He also failed to run for president in nineteen oh four.
Late in life, he made public statements in favor of
the Nazi Party in Germany and then along the way.

Speaker 3 (01:05:48):
He's basically he's basically Elon Musk of the time.

Speaker 1 (01:05:52):
Yeah, and like he made a vast fortune doing different
bad things. To me, it's not drugs. But also he
swung American society with his media reach and would write
personal columns about why we should be more right wing
and why Hitler's fixing Germany and a lot of.

Speaker 3 (01:06:10):
Yellow journalism right, like a lot of just sort of tabloids, yes,
like you know, kind of like a rupert.

Speaker 1 (01:06:16):
Murdoch type made all media worse.

Speaker 3 (01:06:19):
Yeah, like where it's like, here's something it's not necessarily true,
but it'll sell papers.

Speaker 1 (01:06:24):
Hurst also liked animals, and so he builds this vast
estate centering on a castle on the central coast of California.
It's near a modern town named San Simeon, and it
had a private combination ranch and zoo sprawling across tens
of thousands of acres. Apparently, in order to get from
the entrance of the estate to the castle, you had

(01:06:45):
to drive five miles down a private road. WHOA, you've
probably done it.

Speaker 3 (01:06:50):
I think so. I think that's might have been where
I saw the condor. But yeah, it's just like it's
a like really long car ride to get from one
point of the estate to the other.

Speaker 1 (01:07:04):
Yeah. And apparently this sparked both real stories and apocryphal
legends about Hearst's wild exotic animals crisscrossing the road because
they had some of the run of the place. And
the wildest, probably apocryphal story, is that Winston Churchill visited
and when he tried to drive down the road at
Giraffe was stubborn and got in the way. It was

(01:07:25):
just this really weird place all around.

Speaker 3 (01:07:28):
Yeah, it's like, well, it's this story I want to
have happened, right, Like Winston Churchill just really flustered in
irate because there's a giraffe in the road.

Speaker 1 (01:07:39):
Yeah, he like tries to defeat at some of his
champagne or something like I don't know, I don't know
what to do it like.

Speaker 3 (01:07:44):
It like sort of like goes and snatches the hat
off his head, like you know, his cigar falls out
in astonishment.

Speaker 1 (01:07:53):
The real weirdest thing is that Hurst, before he dies,
starts to have money troubles, and so he starts selling
a gifting animals in the late nineteen thirties. His favorite
was zebras, and he tried to keep the zebras. They
stay in an enclosure, but then the fence gets knocked
down in a storm, and before herst remaining employees can
handle it, some of the zebras get loose, and there's

(01:08:15):
now a wild herd of more than one hundred individuals
near San Simeon, California.

Speaker 3 (01:08:20):
That's I've never seen those wild zebras, but uh, I
imagine there's something to look at, like, because I know
there's like some wild horse populations in various parts of
the US. But yeah, yeah, yeah, that's crazy.

Speaker 1 (01:08:37):
It's basically another one of those, but in an invasive
way and specifically from a private zoo. And yeah, according
to UC Berkeley wildlife ecologist Justin Brischer's, the zebras might
continue thriving there. The dry and hilly coastal ecosystem works
for them.

Speaker 3 (01:08:54):
Yeah, it's kind of savannah.

Speaker 1 (01:08:55):
Like exactly, and so their only trouble is really too
weird predators. It's human hunters who say, hey, I could
catch a zebra down the street, like cool, okay. And
the other one is California has a long running project
to try to save its mountain lions, yes, which are endemic,

(01:09:15):
and the zebras work for them is pray like it
works out.

Speaker 3 (01:09:19):
That's gotta be so thrilling for a mountain lion. Like
you're used to like, okay, another like another deer, another rat,
another rabbit, and then you just get a hole zebra.

Speaker 1 (01:09:31):
Right, or you get too used to zebras and don't
have any perspective and you're like, right, ooh, a bunny
like you just are you just are unlike all other
mountain lions.

Speaker 2 (01:09:40):
Yeah, yeah, folks.

Speaker 1 (01:09:56):
That's the main episode for this week. I'm so glad
Katie is back from her somewhere and welcome to the
outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering
this episode with a runback through the big takeaways. A
mega takeaway number one modern zoos were invented by French
revolutionaries in Paris and a French born emperor in Vienna.

(01:10:22):
Takeaway number two. Carl Hagenbeck in Hamburg, Germany established the
world's worst concept for a zoo and separately established one
of the best modern practices in zoo keeping. Takeaway number three,
the private zoos of Pablo Escobar and William Randolph Hurst
established hippo and zebra populations in the Americas. And then

(01:10:46):
a really enormous numbers section this week about US and
global zoos, the most popular zoos in the world, the
most amazing zoo babies and zoo moms in recent news,
and also the most ancient zoos in human history. Those
are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode

(01:11:07):
because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you
right now if you support this show at maximumfund dot org.
Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get
a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously
incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's
bonus topic is the theory that the modern us state

(01:11:30):
of Florida is a giant informal zoo. Visit sifpod dot
fund for that bonus show, for a library of more
than twenty one dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows
and a catalog of all sorts of max funbonus shows.
It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to
everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun thanks check

(01:11:52):
out our research sources on this episode's page at maximumfund
dot org. Key sources this week include two excellent Skott
Early books. One is called The Modern Arc, The Story
of Zoo's Past, Present, and Future, that is by author
and NPR journalist Vicky Croke. The other is called Zoo,
a History of Zoological Gardens in the West, co written

(01:12:15):
by Eric Barrete and Elizabeth Hardoin Fougier, who are professors
at Universi Te Jean Moulon in Leon, France. Another key
source this week is Smithsonian Magazine, a feature by Kara
Parks about the Zoo in Vienna at the former schoon
Brune Palace, also a feature by Shows Parks about Carl Hagenback.

(01:12:37):
She cites experts like historian Nigel Rothfels of the University
of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and then lots more resources from The
New York Times, see Not the Big Think, The Guardian,
and other trusted journalism. That page also features resources such
as Native Dashland dot CA. I'm using those to acknowledge
that I recorded this in Lenape, hooking the traditional land

(01:12:59):
of the Muncy Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as
well as the Mohican people, Scatagoque people, and others. Also,
Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I
want to acknowledge in my location, in many other locations
in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much
still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and
join the Free Sift discord, where we're sharing stories and

(01:13:21):
resources about Native people and life. There is a link
in this episode's description to join the discord. We're also
talking about this episode on the discord, and Hey, would
you like it to tip on another episode? Because each
week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating By running
all the past episode numbers through a random number generator.

(01:13:41):
This week's pick is episode one seventy four that's about
the novel Frankenstein and fun fact there the teenager Mary
Shelley was able to write Frankenstein despite being trapped by
a volcanic winter and surrounded by a five sided love
triangle which I call a love pentagon because what else
would you call it? Anyway, I recommend that episode. I

(01:14:02):
also recommend my co host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature
feature about animals, science and more. Our theme music is
Unbroken Unshaven by the Buddhos Band. Our show logo is
by artists Bertin durand special thanks to Chris SUSA for
audio mastering on this episode. Extra extra special thanks go
to our members and thank you to all our listeners.

(01:14:22):
I am thrilled to say we will be back next
week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that?
Talk to you then.

Speaker 3 (01:14:50):
Maximum Fun a worker owned network

Speaker 1 (01:14:53):
Of artists owned shows, supported directly by you.