INTRODUCTION
We humans have had a long association with wild animals. For all but the last few thousand years of our two million years, we have depended on them for our very existence. We were hunters in our early days, drifting along with the game herds, dipping into that seemingly inexhaustible river of life for our food and clothing. When the herds prospered, we are well; when hard times came on them, our bellies shrank. So close was our relationship with wild animals, we called them our brothers.
The Chinese and Egyptians were the first to establish collections of wild animals. About five thousand years ago, Chinese emperors maintained animal parks for their private use, usually hunting. The Pharaohs of Egypt sent expeditions into the interior of Africa to collect animals for royal menageries. Later, Roman legions sent back wild animals, along with human slaves, from their conquests. Often these two – animals and humans – ended up pitted against each other in gladiatorial battles for their captors’ entertainment.
The first true zoo was built in France by Louis XIV, but it was modern only in comparison with what had existed before. Louis’ wild animals were housed in champed, dirty cages, often by themselves, and fed food which rarely approximated their natural diet. Mortality rates were high, but little attention was given to this; dead animals could be replaced easily from the rivers of wildlife still flowing in the wilderness.
At the turn of the 20th century the first modern zoo was designed and built at Stellingen, near Hamburg, Germany. It had a minimum of cages and barred enclosures; animals were exhibited in large, “natural” surroundings of artificial mountains, plains and caves, usually with others of their species.
THE HISTORY
And now I want to tell you about the most famous zoo in the world – The San-Diego Zoo.
In Began with a Roar
The San Diego Zoo, established in 1916, was far different from today's grand; exotic, zoological garden. For the most part, it grew from a small collection of animals held in traditional circus like cages that formed a portion of the city's 1915-1916 Panama-California International Exposition held in Balboa Park. After the close of the Exposition, a San Diego physician, Dr. Harry Wegeforth, rescued these animals and started the present Zoo. He would later recall how it all began:
On September 16, 1916, as I was returning to my office after performing an operation at St. Joseph Hospital, I drove down Sixth Avenue and heard the roaring of the lions in the cages at the Exposition then being held in Balboa Park.
I turned to my brother, Paul, who was riding with me, and half jokingly, half wishfully, said, "Wouldn't it be splendid if San Diego had a zoo! You know ...I think I'll start one."
Wegeforth's idea, with the help of other interested San Diegans, would take shape and prosper over the years. Even as a child, growing up in Baltimore, Maryland, he was fascinated by animals. He regularly staged "circuses" in his backyard, using toy animals and stitched-together flour sacks for a "big top" tent. This interest went far beyond normal childish play, because young Harry had done extensive research on the real-life behavior and characteristics of his animal menagerie and enthusiastically explained all of this to visitors at his "performances."
Later on, as an adult, Wegeforth obtained a medical degree and moved to San Diego in 1908 to set up his practice. The work of building the Zoo, however, was soon to consume almost all of his time. It was a gamble and a dream that he lived daily, but a task he relished.
Together with four other men—Dr. Paul Wegeforth, Dr. Fred Baker, Dr. Joseph H. Thompson, and Frank Stephens—Wegeforth founded the Zoological Society of San Diego on October 2,1916. In 1921, the City of San Diego granted the Society its present home in Balboa Park, and, by 1922, Wegeforth, a few staff members, and a small collection of animals had begun moving in.
Even at this early date, Wegeforth was promoting a zoo that was different from most in existence at that time, including demerits that would, as years passed, result in its being called the "world's greatest zoo." For example, he envisioned a zoological garden where animals could be integrated with plants in pleasing settings with no bars or traditional cages to obstruct a visitor's view. He promoted the idea of grotto and moat enclosures—something just being tried in European zoos and almost unknown in America.
While riding around the Zoo grounds on his Arabian stallion, Wegeforth would map out in his mind the location of exhibits. Mesas would hold hoofed mammals, reptiles, and birds; the canyons would be reserved for bears and cats. In Johnny Appleseed fashion, he scattered and planted seeds for the new plants he desired. Roads that were laid out for the first bus tours are still used today.
To supplement the initial group of animals gathered from the Balboa Park Exposition, Wegeforth made collecting trips to other countries and other zoos, both here and abroad. His aggressive style of exchanging local animals, such as rattlesnakes and California sea lions, for more exotic species soon earned him the title of "Trader Wegeforth." Other animals were donated to the Zoo from private individuals or Navy ships that docked in San Diego and brought "gifts" to Dr. Harry's Zoo.
Through personal vision, determination, his own financial contributions, and those of others, Harry Wegeforth created the San Diego Zoo. To the uninformed observer of the time, it might have seemed that he realized his dream from almost nothing. Indeed, some of the early exhibits were built from castoffs and discards from other construction projects — things that he could acquire for free4 much as he had built his play menageries as a child. He cajoled local wealthy citizens to help him by arousing their' concern for the animals and their city pride. One of his greatest benefactors was newspaper heiress Ellen Browning Scripps, who, by the time of her death, had donated some quarter of a million dollars to the project.
Wegeforth's concern about animal nutrition and health is additionally noteworthy. While not trained as a veterinarian, he nonetheless applied his medical knowledge to the care of Zoo animals and brought in others trained to assist him in this work. This care was reflected in the Zoo's low animal mortality figures.
One day a tiger, writhing in pain with what his keepers suspected to be intestinal problems, needed immediate treatment. As a result of his condition, they considered him too dangerous to rope and tie down for examination (this was an era before the tranquilizer dan gun). Wegeforth sized up the situation and entered the animal's enclosure with a handful of beneficial tablets. The animal crouched, made ready to leap, and opened his gaping jaws to unleash a ferocious roar. At that instant Wegeforth tossed several of the pills into his mouth. Surprised at this action, the tiger backed off momentarily, swallowing the medicine. Not one to back down, the tiger again gathered himself in a crouch, opened his cavernous mouth, and prepared to pounce. Once more Wegeforth administered the medicine, and this time the animal retired to his water basin to wash down the irritating pills. Such examples of Wegeforth's "make do" philosophy of animal medicine made for popular conversation among early Zoo employees.
In April of 1927, just over ten years after the Zoo's founding, he succeeded in opening the Zoological Hospital and Biological Research Institute, a major contribution to the further achievements of the San Diego Zoo. This facility was yet another gift from Miss Scripps.
The Zoo Lady
Also in 1927, the Zoological Society hired its first executive secretary, Mrs. Belle Benchley, an individual who would share Wegeforth's dream and assist him with his goals and plans. She had come to the organization as a bookkeeper in 1925, but soon proved so adept that Wegeforth began using her as his primary assistant. Among other things, he encouraged her to be the Zoo's public relations spokesperson, speaking at civic luncheons—a job she did reluctantly at first but soon mastered. Her work earned her high praise over the years, and following Wegeforth's death in 1941, she took over management of the Zoo.
It was in large part due to Mrs. Benchley that the San Diego Zoo began to achieve a national, even worldwide, prominence. Her books about life at the Zoo, published during the 1940s, made many new friends for the organization. They included My Life in a Man-made Jungle (1940), My Friends the Apes (1942), My Animal Babies (1945), and Shirley Visits the Zoo (1946). Mrs. Benchley's continued care and concern for the Zoo animals' welfare prompted one zoo expert to remark that the San Diego Zoo was "the only zoo in the world that is run for the animals."
Among Mrs. Benchley's more famous accomplishments was the arrival at the Zoo in 1949 of Albert, Bata, and Bouba, a male and two female western lowland gorillas from French West Africa. All less than a year old, these gorilla babies captured the hearts of San Diegans, who lined up by the hundreds to see them. Their first day on exhibit a crowd of some 10,000 arrived, setting a new Zoo attendance record.
The Schroeder Years
Following the retirement of Mrs. Benchley in 1953, Dr. Charles Schroeder became director of the Zoological Society in January of 1954. He was the Zoo's first leader with a scientific background in animal care. Dr. Schroeder received his doctor of veterinary medicine degree from Washington State University in 1929 and had initially been hired at the Zoo as a veterinarian/ pathologist in 1932. But, as he often recalled, he performed many other duties as well, such as taking photographs to sell to visitors as postcards.
It was through Dr. Schroeder's vision and persistence that the San Diego Zoo's sister facility, the San Diego Wild Animal Park, came into existence and later opened to the public in 1972. As director of the Zoo until 1972, he was also responsible for many other now well-known Zoo attractions, including the Skyfari aerial tramway, the Children's Zoo, and the moving sidewalk or escalator. He further increased the Zoo's commitment to research and remodeled its hospital.
It was also during this period that the local television show "Zoorama" was created, with its first airing in January 1955. Later syndicated nationally, the program brought the San Diego Zoo into the homes of millions of viewers across the nation.
Into the Present
The history of the San Diego Zoo in recent years has been one of a new awareness of the role of zoos in our world. Under the able leadership of new directors and members of the board of trustees, the Zoo has become increasingly concerned with captive breeding and the conservation of wildlife. Consequently, a number of conservation projects have been established, both at the Zoo and Wild Animal Park as well as elsewhere around the world. The first international conference on the role of zoos in conservation was hosted by the San Diego Zoo in 1966, during the celebration of the Zoo's 50th birthday. In addition, the Zoological Society presented its first conservation awards that year.
Perhaps the most outstanding of the Zoo's conservation projects has been the Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species (CRES). Launched in 1975 as an intensive research effort to improve the health and breeding success of exotic animals, CRES is dedicated to its primary goal of helping endangered species of animals reproduce and survive, both in captivity and in the wild.
Some of the achievements CRES is most proud of have included gratifying reproductive successes with cheetahs, Indian and southern white rhinoceroses, and Przewalski's wild horses.
THE ANIMALS OF EURASIA
Eurasia is the largest land mass on earth, stretching halfway around the globe from the British Isles to the Pacific Ocean, and from the Bering Sea south to the tip of Malaysia, an area of 54 million sq km (21 million:sq -л»ХА few of its animal species, especially those in the north, are closely related to, and in some instances are the same as, those of North America.
Relatively recently, as earth time is measured, Eurasia was linked to America by a land bridge which spanned what is now the Bering Straits. This causeway existed for thousands of years during the Ice Ages, when much of the earth's water was locked up in glaciers, thus lowering sea level. Animals crossed back and forth between the two continents on the land bridge, and the first human settlers in America probably arrived via this route.
About ten thousand years ago, the latest in a series of ice ages came to an end. The ice melted; the seas rose, and the Bering land bridge was submerged. Animal species which had wandered west into Eurasia or east to America were isolated from their native homelands. But because ten thousand years is a mere eye wink in evolutionary timekeeping, very few changes have had time to take place in these exiles. For example, the largest member of the deer family lives in the taiga of both Eurasia and America. In Eurasia it is called an elk, in America, a moose. But it is one and the same animal. This is also true of another deer, the caribou, or reindeer. The former is a wild animal of America; the latter has been domesticated for centuries by the Lapps of northern Europe.
The Bering land bridge was probably responsible for the survival of at least one species — the horse. This animal originated in the western hemisphere, where it developed from a tiny, three-toed creature, to the form very much like the one we know today. During the Ice Ages, it migrated across the land bridge into Asia, where it thrived. In America the horse became extinct and didn't reappear here until the Spaniards brought it back as a domesticated animal in the 16th century.
The Spanish horses, as are all domestic breeds, were descendants of the wild horses which migrated from America. That original breed still exists. It is called Przewalski's horse, named for the naturalist who first brought specimens to Europe from the grasslands of Mongolia. This is the only true wild horse left in the world. All other so-called "wild" horses are feral animals, that is, horses descended from domestic animals which escaped from or were released by their owners. Przewalski's horses once existed in large herds, but human intrusion into their habitat pushed them farther and farther back into a harsh environment where even these tough animals could not survive.
They were last seen in the wilderness in 1967. Fortunately breeding groups existed in zoos and reserves. Captive propagation brought the population up to about 700 by 1985, and four dozen Przewalski's horses have been born at the San Diego Zoo and the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Several of the Zoological Society's Przewalski's horses are on breeding loans to other zoos.
The Eurasian bison, called a wisent, is closely related to the American bison. Although never so numerous as the American member of the species, wisent used to roam the forests which covered western Europe. Centuries of cutting destroyed all but a small remnant of these forests and came within 17 animals of exterminating the wisent. A captive breeding program saved them and today a few hundred live in the Bialowieza Forest in eastern Poland. The San Diego Zoo has produced 25 calves.
If the felling of Europe's forests meant the destruction of many wild animal species, it worked to the advantage of others. Deer, for instance, have thrived and live from the British Isles eastward. Red, roe and fallow deer live in western Europe, sika deer in Japan. Pere David's deer, formerly a native of marshy areas in central China, is extinct in the wild. It exists only in zoos and reserves.
The hedgerows of western Europe house many small animal species. There are foxes, rabbits, hares, badgers, ferrets, squirrels and birds. These and other animals have adapted to life in a human-dominated environment. Starlings and sparrows, for example, do so well that they are considered "pest" birds. Until recently, one of Europe's largest birds, the white stork, even nested in the smaller towns and villages. The bird was considered a symbol of good luck, and home-owners built platforms on rooftops for its nests. This practice is no longer common and the stork avoids the towns.
The most regal of Eurasia's raptors is the golden eagle, and the bird has figured in history for centuries. Its image was carried by Roman legions as they conquered much of the continent. During the Middle Ages, lesser members of royalty were free to use other raptors for falconry, but the eagle was reserved for the king. Today, in more remote parts of Asia, the golden eagle is used to hunt wild goats, gazelles, foxes, and wolves. The bird occurs in the United States, where it is under federal protection. It can be seen in San Diego's back country and often is observed soaring over the San Diego Wild Animal Park.
Several other northern Eurasia predators are found in North America — falcons, hawks and owls; mammals including wolves, wolverines and foxes. a However, two mammalian predators are unique to I the Old World — leopards and tigers. Leopards range i from northern Asia into Africa; tigers live only in Asia I from Manchuria southward into India and Malaysia. There are five races of this great cat; all of them are endangered. The Zoo enjoys considerable success breeding and raising Siberian tigers, of which the total world population is only about 750 individuals. More than two dozen cubs have been born and raised at the Zoo.