1. Hornaday, Blair and Osborn all pushed for significant changes in the zoo design that would inspire , so to speak, other zoos across the country in their design.
Hornaday was a huge advocate for conservation of wild life, and made strong pushes to send the zoo in the direction of conservation. he also really didn’t want anyone calling it the Bronx Zoo. Sorry Mr. Hornaday.
Blair followed up Hornaday and made moves towards enclosures without bars, but a damper was put on his efforts by the Great Depression.
Osborn made very significant changes in the zoo, as a means to bring more people in, as visitor rates had been declining, such as lifting a 40 year old ban on cameras, bringing in a road train for visitors, and opening a department of insects & even more! Very notably, he opened the African Plains exhibit (funded by Marshall Field). He also pushed for the zoo to return to its goal of conservation, expanding it to include not only animals but forests, soils and water as well.
One of the greatest things about the African Plains exhibit was that introduced the idea of an environment for the animals to be in - and for viewers to see the animals in that mimicked the environment the animals would exist in in the real world. One of the cons of the exhibit though was that the viewer was still significantly separated from the environment.
Overall I think Hancocks seems to praise the Bronx Zoo because, while he seems to be generally skeptical of zoos, the Bronx Zoo seems to have made significant steps in the direction towards
2a. There were significant innovations that were introduced at the Seattle Woodland Park Zoo that definitely had an impact on lots and lots of other zoos.
One of the most notable innovations that happened at the Seattle Woodland Park Zoo was the departure from taxonomic and geographic thinking towards zoo-organization, moving on to organizing the zoo by bioclimatic zone.
They were also - very importantly - possibly the first zoo to say that they were there first for the needs of the animals and only after that there for the viewers.
They also brought in landscape architects to make good living spaces for the animals.
They thought that the immersion landscape set up was superior because it integrated people more into an environment with the animals and doing that would cause more emotional attachment to the experience and more desire to help out in conservation efforts.
2b. Zoos that are working in the idea of landscape immersion exhibits are starting to think more along the lines of what is good for the overall exhibit and the animals instead of what the zoo goers want to see, like in the case of the jaguar passing away and the zoo not getting another jaguar for the exhibit because the jaguar would not be better inside the environment.
3. I think that Wilson’s argument that humans prefer certain habitats due to things we’ve learned through evolution makes a lot of sense, and it’s something I’ve heard before. I think that it fits with the idea of biophilia and humans desire to be around living things. I think that perhaps some zoo goers would get more out of the experience if the animals were in a landscape setting that mimicked the real world, and would make the viewer of the exhibit feel as though they were also in the environment with the animal. I think that humans desire to be around, and witness to natural living things was entirely the cause of the rise of zoos once the world started to become more industrialized.
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