Zoo facts for kids
A zoological garden, zoological park, or zoo is a place where many different species types of animals are kept so people can see and watch them.
Modern zoos try not only to be for people's entertainment, but for education, research, and the conservation and protection of animals. Many zoos are centers where rare animals are preserved when they are in danger of dying out. These modern zoos also want to give the animals a natural life, so that they are healthy and behave normal. This is done for the animals, but also that people can see the animals as if they were in nature, and not in a zoo.
Zoos cost money. They educate the public on the biological diversity that makes up the world. They help people and wildlife successfully coexist. They pursue continuing research and education for people. They preserve crucial natural resources. They work to ensure zoos can provide the most natural environment possible for wildlife in its care. Without enough money they cannot do these things.
Many zoos are not like the modern type of zoo. There the animals are held in bad conditions. They are kept in small cages, and they are bored and get sick.
Contents
History
Royal menageries
The predecessor of the zoological garden is the menagerie, which has a long history from the ancient world to modern times. The oldest known zoological collection was revealed during excavations at Hierakonpolis, Egypt in 2009, of a c. 3500 BCE menagerie. The exotic animals included hippopotami, hartebeest, elephants, baboons and wildcats. King Ashur-bel-kala of the Middle Assyrian Empire created zoological and botanical gardens in the 11th century BCE. In the 2nd century BCE, the Chinese Empress Tanki had a "house of deer" built, and King Wen of Zhou kept a 1,500-acre (6.1 km2) zoo called Ling-Yu, or the Garden of Intelligence. Other well-known collectors of animals included King Solomon of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah, Queen Semiramis and King Ashurbanipal of Assyria, and King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia. By the 4th century BCE, zoos existed in most of the Greek city states; Alexander the Great is known to have sent animals that he found on his military expeditions back to Greece. The Roman emperors kept private collections of animals for study or for use in the arena. Charlemagne had an elephant named Abul-Abbas that was given to him by the Abbasid caliph.
King Henry I of England kept a collection of animals at his palace in Woodstock which reportedly included lions, leopards, and camels. The most prominent collection in medieval England was in the Tower of London, created as early as 1204 by King John I. Henry III received a wedding gift in 1235 of three leopards from Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, and in 1264, the animals were moved to the Bulwark, renamed the Lion Tower, near the main western entrance of the Tower. It was opened to the public during the reign of Elizabeth I in the 16th century. During the 18th century, the price of admission was three half-pence, or the supply of a cat or dog for feeding to the lions. The animals were moved to the London Zoo when it opened.
Aztec emperor Moctezuma had in his capital city of Tenochtitlan a "house of animals" with a large collection of birds, mammals and reptiles in a garden tended by more than 600 employees. The garden was described by several Spanish conquerors, including Hernán Cortés in 1520. After the Aztec revolt against the Spanish rule, and during the subsequent battle for the city, Cortés reluctantly ordered the zoo to be destroyed.
Enlightenment era
The oldest zoo in the world still in existence is the Tiergarten Schönbrunn in Vienna, Austria. It was constructed by Adrian van Stekhoven in 1752 at the order of Emperor Francis I, to serve as an imperial menagerie as part of Schönbrunn Palace. The menagerie was initially reserved for the viewing pleasure of the imperial family and the court, but was made accessible to the public in 1765. In 1775, a zoo was founded in Madrid, and in 1795, the zoo inside the Jardin des Plantes in Paris was founded by Jacques-Henri Bernardin, with animals from the royal menagerie at Versailles, primarily for scientific research and education. The planning about a space for the conservation and observation of animals was expressed in connection with the political construction of republican citizenship.
The Kazan Zoo, the first zoo in Russia was founded in 1806 by the Professor of Kazan State University Karl Fuchs.
The modern zoo
Until the early 19th century, the function of the zoo was often to symbolize royal power, like King Louis XIV's menagerie at Versailles. Major cities in Europe set up zoos in the 19th century, usually using London and Paris as models. The transition was made from princely menageries designed to entertain high society with strange novelties into public zoological gardens. The new goal was to educate the entire population with information along modern scientific lines. Zoos were supported by local commercial or scientific societies.
British Empire
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The modern zoo that emerged in the 19th century in the United Kingdom, was focused on providing scientific study and later educational exhibits to the public for entertainment and inspiration.
A growing fascination for natural history and zoology, coupled with the tremendous expansion in the urbanization of London, led to a heightened demand for a greater variety of public forms of entertainment to be made available. The need for public entertainment, as well as the requirements of scholarly research, came together in the founding of the first modern zoos. Whipsnade Park Zoo in Bedfordshire, England, opened in 1931. It allowed visitors to drive through the enclosures and come into close proximity with the animals.
The Zoological Society of London was founded in 1826 by Stamford Raffles and established the London Zoo in Regent's Park two years later in 1828. At its founding, it was the world's first scientific zoo. Originally intended to be used as a collection for scientific study, it was opened to the public in 1847. The Zoo was located in Regent's Park—then undergoing development at the hands of the architect John Nash. What set the London zoo apart from its predecessors was its focus on society at large. The zoo was established in the middle of a city for the public, and its layout was designed to cater for the large London population. The London zoo was widely copied as the archetype of the public city zoo. In 1853, the Zoo opened the world's first public aquarium.
Dublin Zoo was opened in 1831 by members of the medical profession interested in studying animals while they were alive and more particularly getting hold of them when they were dead.
Downs' Zoological Gardens created by Andrew Downs and opened to the Nova Scotia public in 1847. It was originally intended to be used as a collection for scientific study. By the early 1860s, the zoo grounds covered 40 hectares with many fine flowers and ornamental trees, picnic areas, statues, walking paths, The Glass House (which contained a greenhouse with an aviary, aquarium, and museum of stuffed animals and birds), a pond, a bridge over a waterfall, an artificial lake with a fountain, a wood-ornamented greenhouse, a forest area, and enclosures and buildings.
The first zoological garden in Australia was Melbourne Zoo in 1860.
Germany
In German states leading roles came Berlin (1841), Frankfurt (1856), and Hamburg (1863). In 1907, the entrepreneur Carl Hagenbeck founded the Tierpark Hagenbeck in Stellingen, now a quarter of Hamburg. His zoo was a radical departure from the layout of the zoo that had been established in 1828. It was the first zoo to use open enclosures surrounded by moats, rather than barred cages, to better approximate animals' natural environments. He also set up mixed-species exhibits and based the layout on the different organizing principle of geography, as opposed to taxonomy.
Poland
The Wrocław Zoo (Polish: Ogród Zoologiczny we Wrocławiu) is the oldest zoo in Poland, opened in 1865 when the city was part of Prussia, and was home to about 10,500 animals representing about 1,132 species (in terms of the number of animal species, it is the third largest in the world). In 2014 the Wrocław Zoo opened the Africarium, the only themed oceanarium devoted solely to exhibiting the fauna of Africa, comprehensively presenting selected ecosystems from the continent of Africa. Housing over 10 thousand animals, the facility's breadth extends from housing insects such cockroaches to large mammals like elephants on an area of over 33 hectares.
United States
In the United States, the Philadelphia Zoo, opened July 1, 1874, earning its motto "America's First Zoo." The Lincoln Park Zoological Gardens in Chicago and the Cincinnati Zoo opened in 1875. In the 1930s, federal relief programs provided financial aid to most local zoos. The Works Progress Administration and similar New Deal government agencies helped greatly in the construction, renovation, and expansion of zoos when the Great Depression severely reduced local budgets. It was "a new deal for animals."
The Atlanta Zoo, founded in 1886, suffered neglect. By 1984 it was ranked among the ten worst zoos in the United States. Systematic reform by 2000 put it on the list of the ten best.
By 2020, the United States featured 230 accredited zoos and aquariums across 45 states, accommodating 800,000 animals, and 6,000 species out of which about 1,000 are endangered. The zoos provide 208,000 jobs, and with an annual budget of $230 million for wildlife conservation. They attract over 200 million visits a year and have special programs for schools. They are organized by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.
Japan
Japan's first modern zoo, Tokyo's Ueno Imperial Zoological Gardens, opened in 1882 based on European models. In World War II it was used to teach the Japanese people about the lands recently conquered by the Army.
Type
Zoo animals live in enclosures that often attempt to replicate their natural habitats or behavioral patterns, for the benefit of both the animals and visitors. Nocturnal animals are often housed in buildings with a reversed light-dark cycle, i.e. only dim white or red lights are on during the day so the animals are active during visitor hours, and brighter lights on at night when the animals sleep. Special climate conditions may be created for animals living in extreme environments, such as penguins. Special enclosures for birds, mammals, insects, reptiles, fish, and other aquatic life forms have also been developed. Some zoos have walk-through exhibits where visitors enter enclosures of non-aggressive species, such as lemurs, marmosets, birds, lizards, and turtles. Visitors are asked to keep to paths and avoid showing or eating foods that the animals might snatch.
Safari park
Some zoos keep animals in larger, outdoor enclosures, confining them with moats and fences, rather than in cages. Safari parks, also known as zoo parks and lion farms, allow visitors to drive through them and come in close proximity to the animals. Sometimes, visitors are able to feed animals through the car windows.
The first safari park was Whipsnade Park in Bedfordshire, England, opened by the Zoological Society of London in 1931 which today (2014) covers 600 acres (2.4 km2). Since the early 1970s, an 1,800 acre (7 km2) park in the San Pasqual Valley near San Diego has featured the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, run by the Zoological Society of San Diego. One of two state-supported zoo parks in North Carolina is the 2,000-acre (8.1 km2) North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro. The 500-acre (2.0 km2) Werribee Open Range Zoo in Melbourne, Australia, displays animals living in an artificial savannah.
Aquaria
The first public aquarium was opened at the London Zoo in 1853. This was followed by the opening of public aquaria in continental Europe (e.g. Paris in 1859, Hamburg in 1864, Berlin in 1869, and Brighton in 1872) and the United States (e.g. Boston in 1859, Washington in 1873, San Francisco Woodward's Garden in 1873, and the New York Aquarium at Battery Park in 1896).
Roadside zoos
Roadside zoos are found throughout North America, particularly in remote locations. They are often small, for-profit zoos, often intended to attract visitors to some other facility, such as a gas station. The animals may be trained to perform tricks, and visitors are able to get closer to them than in larger zoos. Since they are sometimes less regulated, roadside zoos are often subject to accusations of neglect and cruelty.
In June 2014 the Animal Legal Defense Fund filed a lawsuit against the Iowa-based roadside Cricket Hollow Zoo for violating the Endangered Species Act by failing to provide proper care for its animals. Since filing the lawsuit, ALDF has obtained records from investigations conducted by the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services; these records show that the zoo is also violating the Animal Welfare Act.
Petting zoos
A petting zoo, also called petting farms or children's zoos, features a combination of domestic animals and wild species that are docile enough to touch and feed. To ensure the animals' health, the food is supplied by the zoo, either from vending machines or a kiosk nearby.
Animal theme parks
An animal theme park is a combination of an amusement park and a zoo, mainly for entertaining and commercial purposes. Marine mammal parks such as Sea World and Marineland are more elaborate dolphinariums keeping whales, and containing additional entertainment attractions. Another kind of animal theme park contains more entertainment and amusement elements than the classical zoo, such as stage shows, roller coasters, and mythical creatures. Some examples are Busch Gardens Tampa Bay in Tampa, Florida, both Disney's Animal Kingdom and Gatorland in Orlando, Florida, Flamingo Land in North Yorkshire, England, and Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo, California.
Images for kids
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Penguins at London Zoo.
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Giant Pandas in Chiang Mai Zoo.
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A Siberian tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) at Korkeasaari Zoo in Helsinki, Finland
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London Zoo, 1835
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Ota Benga, a human exhibit in New York, 1906
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The African plains exhibit at North Carolina Zoo illustrates the dimension of an open-range zoo.
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Bear cages, one square meter in size, in Dalian zoo, Port Arthur, Liaoning Province, China, in 1997
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WPA 1937 poster promoting visits to American zoos
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See also
In Spanish: Jardín zoológico para niños
