One by one, London is losing the symbols of 19th-century scholarship. First it was the Round Reading Room at the British Museum, which is shortly to lose its function as a pantheon of learning. Then the Victoria & Albert and the Natural History Museums were obliged to popularise their exhibitions. Now London Zoo has announced that it is to close in September.
The Zoological Gardens at Regent's Park, which gave their name to one of the most enduring and popular institutions bequeathed by the imperial age, have suffered from falling attendance and rising costs. Science and spectators can no longer both be satisfied by this temple of empiricism; so the first of the zoos, which was also the last of the royal menageries, is to lose its animals. No longer will Primrose Hill echo to leonine roars and gibbonian whoops. The empty and silent cages will be a melancholy monument to the vanity of human benevolence: one era's expression of its love for creation is a later period's animal prison.
Behind the specific economic causes of the London Zoo's decline lies a profound shift in the relationship between man and beast over the past century. Yet the fascination and respect for animals embodied in the zoo was itself new. For millions of years, relations were combative. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, animals had an honoured but subordinate role. Although medieval bestiaries demonstrate a lively curiosity about the animal kingdom, and occasional luminaries such as St Francis of Assisi and Albrecht Durer gave evidence of a deep awe of other creatures, man's lordship was never in doubt.
A couple of decades after the zoo's foundation, Captain Ahab in Moby Dick (1851) addresses the white whale in these bloodcurdling words: "Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee." Ahab, however, was already an anachronism, a figure whose attitude to the largest mammal is intentionally depicted as pathological.
At about the same date, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was writing passionately about the essential identity of man and beast in his Parerga et Paralipomena. The ability to feel compassion for animals, he thought, was perhaps the most important test of our humanity, and its elevation to a religious doctrine was the measure of Buddhism's superiority over Christianity. He raged against the habitual cruelty of continental Europeans towards animals, and praised the British for having tried to prevent it with a royal society, the RSPCA. The progenitor of philosophical pessimism cared more for his poodle than for mankind. Despite his admiration for natural science in general and for zoology in particular, he thought vivisection not merely evil, but devilish.
Such views spread rapidly during the age of empire. Contemporaries as various as Shaw and Kafka became vegetarians, and the progress of science fuelled the desire to preserve animals and to improve their status. The intensive study of chimpanzees in the Canary Islands by the founder of Gestalt psychology, Wolfgang Kohler, during the first world war showed how individual the primates are in their mental responses. Apes are less intelligent than human beings but solve simple problems in much the same way. This was only one example of the kind of research that turned brute beasts back into sacred cows.
One side-effect of this process was that zoos became more peripheral to zoology. There was nothing new about studying animals in their natural habitats, of course: Darwin had done so, and long before him Linnaeus, Alexander von Humboldt and other pioneering students of the natural world. But most research was carried out on animals in captivity. During the 20th century, though, the artificial environment of the zoo began to get in the way.
For the public, disillusionment came later. They continued to enjoy rides on elephants and dromedaries, chimpanzees' tea parties and other anthropomorphic pleasures. The idea that animals should enjoy equal (or even superior) rights, that ogling them behind bars was demeaning, had few and improbable prophets. Adolf Hitler bored his satraps to death with long disquisitions on "the religion of the future", based on vegetarianism and animal rights.
Such theories - pregnant with malign significance, given the Nazi programme of human extermination - were never influential in their extreme forms. Gradually, however, a predominantly urban sentimentality about animals emerged. As horses and other beasts of burden vanished from the cities, as rural vermin ceased to be an everyday problem for most of the population, and as television documentaries showed animals in a new and more splendid light (at a safe distance), a new militancy was born. Hunting and vivisection were its chief targets, but zoos too came under fire.
Like the lunatic asylums of the past, which were also intended as places of safety, zoos were castigated for providing an obscene spectator sport. They responded by creating more distance between animals and visitors (no more rides) and eliminating spectacles such as chimps' tea parties. The physical proximity of animal noises, smells and sights with which zoos could still outbid the neatly edited television films were rivalled by safari parks.
By the early 1950s, London Zoo was beginning to lose visitors inexorably, and now that the zoo has abandoned its losing battle against public opinion, perhaps we shall be sorry. One section of society certainly will. Children, who naturally make common cause with animals against the bossy adult world, will not thank us for this collective pomposity.
