News in Zoos

There seems to be something both pleasing and prestigious in having wild animals where you want them. The bachelor Prince Rainier of Monaco made a lasting impression on Movie Actress Grace Kelly by showing her around his private zoo, and he had plenty of royal precedent. Some 3,000 years ago, Egypt's Empress Hatasu sent out a whole fleet in search of new animals to stock her private menagerie; Emperor Wen, the first of China's Chou dynasty (12th century B.C.), had a collection of animals he called "the Garden of Intelligence"; Roman Emperor Octavius Augustus had no fewer than 420 tigers, 260 lions and 600 assorted other specimens from Africa.

Wild animals are mostly a municipal matter today, but they are more popular than ever. Of the 30 largest cities in the U.S. only two do not have at least one zoo (Minneapolis and Newark). Recently Los Angeles announced plans for a new $6,600,000 zoo designed by Architect Charles Luckman. Indianapolis has just opened a twelve-acre, $800,000 children's zoo as a mere preliminary to a 38-acre main zoo to be added within the next four years.

The Indianapolis children's zoo contains a Japanese garden, with pagoda, pool and bridge, in which a collection of Japanese wildlife run free; a miniature train tours the grounds behind a replica of an 1863 locomotive; a walk-in whale has an aquarium in his stomach; there is an underwater glass panel for viewing submarine life and an underground panel to watch burrowing animals at work. An "elephant-rama" houses a baby elephant named Tumthong, bought with the nickels and dimes of 100,000 Indianapolis and Marion County schoolchildren. And of course there is a chicken hatchery--a staple of children's zoos because they are not only educational for the small fry but also supply live food for a grownups' zoo's snakes.

Paddling Through Animals. Dreamer-up of all this zoological ingenuity is North America's No. 1 architect to the animal world, Robert Everly, 58, of Winnetka, Ill. Everly got into zoo designing ten years ago as a byproduct of planning recreation areas, and has traveled all over the world studying old zoos and planning new ones.

Most zoos, says Everly, suffer from lack of long-range planning, plus ignorance on the part of architects, who have a tendency to treat the buildings as monuments, making them too big, impossible to heat, and badly ventilated. Then, too, the modern conception of a zoo's function is quite different from what it was 50 years ago, when the main idea was to display curious creatures. Today the emphasis is on presenting a representative selection of the world's animals in surroundings that simulate their native environments.

Carrying out the principle pioneered by Hamburg's Hagenbeck Zoo, Everly and most modern zoomakers do away with bars and cages as far as possible, separate animals from people by relatively invisible barriers, such as moats --a technique that Chicago's Brookfield zoo and the excellent St. Louis zoo pioneered in the U.S. The most advanced arrangement, to be followed in Los Angeles' new zoo, is to group animals geographically. In Everly's Angrignon Park Zoo in Montreal, he plans an "African Veld" with antelope, eland, ostrich, rhinoceros, hippopotamus; "South American pampas" with tapir, llama, deer; and an "Asian Plain" (antelope, sheep, deer and birds). A navigable river will flow through the zoo's center so that visitors can paddle by and watch the wildlife grazing on the shore.

Everly plots the movements of the humans as carefully in the modern zoo as those of the animals. In the zoo he is building in Omaha, for instance, visitors start at the top of a gentle slope and walk downhill all the way--sometimes above the animals, sometimes on the same level--to meet their buses at the foot.

Up-to-date zoos separate outsiders and inmates with glass--sometimes electrified to discourage assault--which also serves to protect the animals from human germs and the lethal things people are so fond of offering animals to eat. Glass, though, is not for lions. "Enclose a lion in a glass cage and you'll drive him crazy," says Everly.

Saving the Species. Zoos are going in for more showmanship, such as the red-light rooms, in which nocturnal animals are tricked by the red lights into thinking day is night, therefore moving around for the audience instead of snoozing the visiting hours away. They are also expanding. San Diego, which already has the largest animal collection in the world, is planning to add six acres, and Zoo Designer Everly currently has enlargement programs under way at Denver, Columbus, Boston and Johannesburg.

"Zoos are more important, as well as more popular than they used to be," says Everly, "because of the number of species that are disappearing from the earth. It's estimated that one species of animal has disappeared every year for the past 50 years.* With the great game preserves of Africa being cut into, the only place to protect all kinds of species is in our zoos."

* Among them: Barbary lion, Rufous gazelle, Florida wolf, Carolina parakeet and Henshaw's grizzly.

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