The relaunch of London Zoo this week should be welcomed by conservationists and taxpayers alike. This apparently obsolete Victorian institution, which has cost the Treasury รบ30 million since 1980, now plans to seek private funding and concentrate its efforts on conservation rather than showmanship. Slothful management has given way to sharp vision.
The public attitude to zoos is complex. Donations pour in to those that cry for help. Yet attendance has declined dramatically in London's case, from three million visitors a year in the 1950s, to less than a million. To vote in such different ways with the cheque-book and the feet suggests a popular nervousness about the proper role of zoos.
In its royal charter, the Zoological Society of London is committed to "the advancement of Zoology and Animal Physiology" in the study of its Regent's Park collection of animals: the learned findings are recorded in the Journal of Zoology and International Zoo Yearbook. But the same magisterial document also calls for "the introduction of new and curious subjects of the Animal Kingdom". London Zoo is as much a showcase for living attractions as it is a serious research institute.
The human desire to peer through the dark glass of Nature at the animal kingdom is ancient, visible in cave paintings, King Solomon's private menagerie and the Chinese emperors' marble deer house built in 1150 BC. The great zoos founded in Vienna, Madrid, Paris and London between 1752 and 1828 democratised a previously aristocratic pleasure, which has since degenerated into banal anthropomorphism. The chimpanzees' tea party and dromedary ride may be no more; but politicians still queue up to shake the hand of visiting Chinese officials consigning another panda to a miserable life in a glass-fronted box.
A modern zoo must be more than a bio-Disneyland. Television has brought the reality of wildlife in all its savage beauty into every home and made the artifice of the zoological theme park redundant. Its prying cameras have been the main contributor to a new, and as yet unfocused, global consciousness of man's changing relations with the natural world.
The world is far less sanguine about the confinement of animals than it was when London Zoo was founded in 1828. The pre-Enlightenment belief that man has careless dominion over the beasts dies hard, but the writings of Bentham and Schopenhauer against animal exploitation are gaining intellectual currency. Contemporary philosophers such as Tom Regan and Peter Singer offer a new vision of "animal rights" too puritanical to be enacted. But the appearance of Bentham's slogans against animal suffering in shop windows is not simply faddish.
Zoos will have an essential role to play in the emergence of this new intellectual paradigm, directing their energies towards the conservation of endangered species and away from animal cabaret. Polar bears do not belong in cities, as Glasgow Zoo has already acknowledged. But it is right that zoos should breed in captivity those thousands of species now facing extinction.
Zookeepers must become the ecological auditors of the next century, educating the public along the way. By its imaginative response to this challenge, London Zoo has ensured that it is not yet a dodo.
