The Origin of Zoos London After Dark 4 European History

Monkeys shriek, zebras bray, ironwork clangs with the impact of massive bodies. Hooves thump on old timbers, sluggish at first but then building into a manic clatter as the dismal thundering cough of a lion cuts through the rest of the cacophony. Horses falter below on the street, spooked by the noise, but they're quickly pacified and morning continues amid the Because this is business as usual, after all. There's been a menagerie of wild animals on the upper floor of the Exeter Change Building for half a century, and to the citizens of London, these noises are no more exotic than tavern chatter or cartwheels on cobble, even when the splintering sounds begin. Interspersed with repeated, ever-louder bellows it only draws a few frowns. Probably just a spirited child teasing a camel with a knife, they figure. Boys will be boys, they tut, with less conviction, as a unit of soldiers now comes barreling down the street from Somerset House. But when guns start firing and don't stop, the people of London begin to form a crowd outside the building. In the end, it takes 90 minutes for the muskets to fall silent. When the smoke clears, the scene awaiting the public will perhaps be the most damning in the history of animal husbandry. This is the beginning of the end of the medieval-style menagerie, but the history of the zoo is about to begin. Thanks so much to FarmKind for working towards transforming our food system to be kinder to animals, people, and the planet. The longer you spend studying the history of zoos and their precursors, the more it starts to feel like you're actually studying the history of people being cruel to elephants. And as the largest land animals on Earth, it's not hard to understand why elephants were an obvious centerpiece aspiration for any animal-collecting culture familiar with them. And given how far their historical ranges once extended across Africa, Europe, and Asia, that ends up being a lot of cultures. For example, we know that there were elephants alongside hippos, baboons, and wildcats kept at Hierakonpolis, a pre-dynastic Egyptian settlement that existed around 3100 BCE. That is particularly impressive since this would have been a wild elephant captured a thousand years before humans first domesticated Asian elephants in the Indus Valley, and they've been a regular feature of animal collections ever since. Now, you may have noticed that I keep avoiding calling things zoos in a video about, you know, zoos. But there is a good reason for that. The word zoo, you see, is short for zoological garden. And look, while I'll allow the garden part, since I'm sure the good people of Hierakonpolis and their successors had a great eye for decorative shrubs, there sure as heck was not a lot of zoology going on back then. On the contrary, for a shockingly large chunk of their history, wild animal collections had one overriding purpose. Conspicuous consumption as a visual symbol of a ruler's power. In ancient agrarian cultures, where command of a food surplus translated to raw economic power, there were few more effective ways of flashing one's figurative cash than to keep a large number of hungry animals around the place. Furthermore, the larger the animals, the more powerful the statement became. And whoever keeps elephants, well, they must be in possession of elephant money. Now, perhaps you've also heard the expression white elephant, meaning a supposed gift that ends up becoming a massive burden. Well, this phrase has its roots in Southeast Asian folklore, where white elephants were considered to confer the greatest status of all to a ruler, in large part because they were even more costly to keep than regular elephants. As the story goes, a courtier who received a white elephant from the king, in theory, would be receiving a great honor. But in practice, they would be ruined by a peanut bill that only a king could afford. This theory of elephanomics, if you will, was central to the proliferation of menageries in the medieval period. As a combination of advances in merchant shipping and the advent of the crusading movement gave European royal courts greater and greater geographical reach, more and more exotic animals from Africa and Asia started making their way to European menageries. Okay, so far, so prestigious. However, unlike the keepers in the ancient world, whose stock was generally comprised of local well-understood animals, the beleaguered beast masters of Europe were now finding themselves in possession of animals they had no idea how to maintain properly, and as a bonus, were also ruinously expensive. Their solution, white elephant style, seemed to be to foist their unwanted animals off on each other in the guise of cripplingly impractical diplomatic gifts. Even for the many rulers in Europe with uncertain interests in acquiring strange beasts as markers of prestige, it now actually became necessary to keep a menagerie anyway, just as somewhere to store the unwanted fauna given to you by distant relatives. Although earlier kings of England had kept animals in the Tower of London on a casual basis, turns out it was actually Henry III's hand that was finally forced to make something a little more permanent. After receiving a trio of poorly defined big cats from Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, a polar bear from Horkhan IV of Norway, and then finally an elephant from Egypt after a dizzyingly complex bout of diplomacy in France, he ordered a permanent menagerie be built within the tower in 1235, which would remain open until 1834. Henry's court, believing that elephants were carnivores, fed the creature beef as well as several gallons of wine each day. Suffice to say, it did not last long. But now, let's jump forward to 1810, and to the story whose grim end we discussed at the beginning of this episode. It concerns Chou Ni, a young male Asian elephant from Bengal, who arrived in England alongside two other elephants by agents of, who else, but the East India Company. Chou Ni and friends represented a new twist on the concept of elephant money, if you will. They were spoils of empire, but had been brought back to the heartland not to shore up the prestige of the ruler in the eyes of outsiders, but for the entertainment of the general public. In this case, they were to be actors, performing on a stage in London's Convent Garden. Now, the use of elephants as entertainment is a little outside the scope of this story, mostly because it would involve opening the Pandora's box of the Roman games, and we'd be here all week. But as it would happen, Chou Ni wasn't cut out for the theater. After a short career, he was dismissed in a moment of chilling foreshadowing as having a uncertain temper and stage fright, and sent to retirement in the Exeter change. The idea was he would live out his life in that menagerie, doing coin tricks for paying visitors. And it was there, in 1813, that he would encounter Lord Byron, who was thoroughly charmed, saying, quote, the elephant took and gave me my money again, took off my hat, opened a door, trunked a whip, and behaved so well that I wish he was my butler. Very cute, everyone laughs. But alas, I will warn you now, that is where the whimsy runs out of Chou Ni's story. For the next 13 years would not be kind to the maturing elephant. And extra historians, I just need to warn you right now, if you are particularly sensitive to discussions of animal cruelty, you might want to skip ahead to this time code right up here, because things in this section get very dark, and viewer discretion is very much advised. Given that the menagerie in the Exeter change was the seedy low-end competition to the tower menagerie, you know, the same tower menagerie which had been going downhill for 600 years since its high point of feeding an elephant beef, the conditions the animals lived in were appalling, even by contemporary standards. Worse, by 1820, Chou Ni had doubled in size since he arrived in England, and his growth had made him cramped in On top of that, it was common for visitors of the change to feed, tease, shout at, or even prick or cut the animals, trying to elicit some kind of reaction or gain their attention. Chou Ni bore all of this with grace, and continued to bring in business as the menagerie's star attraction. But then, like any newly matured bull elephant, he began to experience the annual testosterone surge known as must. This caused Chou Ni to become aggressive with his keepers, and he sustained a series of injuries thrashing around his cage, including a chronic infection in the pulp of his tusk. The pain only made him more aggressive, which caused further attacks, which caused yet more injury and infection. Before long, he was caught in a downward spiral from which there would be no happy ending. Despite this being clear to all concerned, Chou Ni remained a big financial draw as the menagerie's star attraction, and so remained there, even after killing one of his keepers in November 1825. It was only at the end of February 1826, with Chou Ni's violent rages threatening to bring down the entire second story of the exchange, and with carpenters too afraid to enter his cage to make repairs, did menagerie owner Edward Cross finally agree to action. But the thing was, no one really knew how to kill an elephant, especially indoors in the middle of a major metropolis. So Cross's grand plan? He tried to poison the already berserk elephant and failed. Three times, seemingly increasing Chou Ni's rages. And then finally, on Wednesday March 1st, out of ideas and fearing for the building's integrity, Cross called in the musket men, who pounded the poor creature with musket fire for an hour and a half. When evening fell, since the day's takings had been so disrupted, Cross decided the public should be admitted to the menagerie for a special late night opening. 35 pounds were taken at the door that night. By the light of gas lamps, Londoners peered across a cramped iron cell, where a dark shape lay slumped in a marsh of blood. The keepers raised their lanterns to point out the wounds left by 152 musket ball impacts, and recognition dawned on the faces of the crowd. This was what remained of Chou Ni. There was, in fairness, significant public outcry, especially for the era. Letters were printed in the Times, a poem Farewell Poor Chou Ni was published. Heck, a play entitled Chou Ni La, or The Death of the Elephant at Exeter's Change, had a successful six-month run. Meanwhile, Chou Ni's corpse was dismantled by butchers, his skin and skeleton sold, and his intestines thrown into the Thames. The Strand Menagerie had a similar, if not slower fate, dwindling in attendance, and then was demolished in 1829. So what, if anything, happened as a result of Chou Ni's death? And what can we learn from it? Well, back in 1795, a man named Jacques-Henri Bernardin founded a zoo inside Paris's main botanical garden to house animals previously kept in the Royal Menagerie at Versailles. Crucially, these were both for public display and scientific study. For the first time, meaningful research was being done at a menagerie, giving a purpose to the accumulation of animals from overseas beyond bragging rights, disingenuous royal wedding gifts, or mass entertainment. Britain, as ever, couldn't bear to be beaten to any punch, so enter Stamford Raffles, the man who founded the British colony in Singapore, who now founded the Zoological Society of London, or ZSL, even as Chou Ni's body was barely cool. Two years later, the ZSL opened its site in Regent's Park. Actually, the Raven's Cage is still there to this day, and this would be the home for all future elephants to arrive in Britain, including the famous jumbo. Though actually, there was one enormous exception, which we do sort of have to talk about. In 1972, an elephant arrived as a, you guessed it, diplomatic gift. However, in a throwback to the days of Richard III, the sender became confused, and instead of addressing it to Buckingham Palace, sent it to a small children's zoo in the Crystal Palace area of South London. It ended up with the ZSL, after nearly bankrupting the children's zoo with winter heating bills trying to keep the animal comfortable. Despite ZSL bleeding money, it somehow took them 20 years until the idea of charging for entrance to the Regent's Park facility gained traction, and in 1847, the gates opened to what is considered to be the first modern zoo. The Fish House came soon after, and the Regent's Park Zoo became the blueprint for similar institutions across Europe. Zoos had finally evolved from personal bragging rides and trophy cabinets and storage facilities for inconvenient creatures and manifestations of empire to finally centers of learning and public edification. And while the conditions might not have been perfect by any means, they were at least better. And a zoo dedicated to education meant that in the long run, people learned more and began to care before the animals died. In the 1970s, conservation became a cause among the public for the first time, and expectations of zoos began to change, as did the public reckoning of their value. Large zoos finally shifted from the urge of having one of everything to a place where plans for stocking were based on a reckoning of what would benefit from being there. Similarly, shows featuring large performing animals have largely been wound down, partially after a series of deadly incidents involving circus elephants and orcas. And after 202 years in the capital, it was finally decided that elephants did not need to be in London anymore, and those elephants were moved out Today, the debate continues around the ethics of zoos. On one hand, it is undeniable that many large animals in zoos are not living their natural lives, and that their free-roaming ranges cannot be replicated in a captive environment. This is especially a large concern for intelligent animals like elephants and primates, whose mental health can be impacted by confinement. However, zoos are also often the center of research and successful breeding programs for endangered animals. And there are conservationists who argue that there is utility in keeping some animals on display to the public, so that they can then feel connected to these creatures and be aware that there is a need for conservation to protect them. But it is undeniable that we have come a long way from 1826 on the second floor of the Exeter Change, where a looming elephant had finally had enough, and in turning on his captors, did nothing short of change the world. You know, a fight that continues to this day. In fact, we here at Extra History have been trying to do our part through the years with charity streams for animals, Zoe Plushie is raising money for the ASPCA, and now with FarmKind, an organization we've partnered with whose goal is to transform the treatment of animals in farms, much in the way Chuni's story helped reshape menageries into modern zoos. Because in both cases, truly, awareness is key. Like, did you know that nearly 99% of farmed animals in the U.S. are raised on factory farms? But the vast majority of people, like myself, are opposed to the conditions on these farms. Of course, it's hard to make a difference as an individual, so maybe, again, like me, you weren't really sure what you could do about it. Well, that is where FarmKind comes in. They've identified six of the most evidence-based and effective charities working to end factory farming, allowing you to give small monthly donations to any or all of them based on a variety of personal factors, and don't take a cut of any donation made through the platform because they are philanthropically funded, meaning your donation goes directly towards bankrolling real change for animals. For example, their funding of the Humane League helped to successfully pressure more than 300 major companies like Walmart and McDonald's to commit to cage-free eggs. Or DVF, who for every $1 they spent on government investment campaigns in 2023, secured $68 in public funding for plant-based foods. Or Synergia, who has so far convinced 25 major South American food companies to eliminate some of the cruelest practices in the farming of 21 million pigs. FarmKind even has a tool that can suggest a donation amount based on your diet. It's kind of like calculating your carbon footprint for flights, but for the foods you eat. Just input what you eat weekly to help figure out your personalized monthly donation. But here is the really neat part that got me excited to partner with FarmKind. When you use our code EXTRAHISTORY for a limited time, they will match 50% of your monthly donation, which means even more animals' lives get better. So, to join me in the fight to help fix factory farming, please consider donating to FarmKind here. Then once you've helped the farm animals that, you know, help sustain us, check out our next video here. A gigantic thank you to Angelo Valenciana, Dominic Valenciana, Hunter Z, Joseph Blame, LotusWolf, and Xiliad's Architectures for being phenomenal Legendary Patrons.