Savages and Beasts
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€32.50
A01=Nigel Rothfels
animal abuse
animal captivity
animal kingdom
animal rights
animal treatment in zoos
animal welfare
Author_Nigel Rothfels
Category=NHD
Category=PDX
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
natural history
wild animals
zoology
zoos
Product details
- ISBN 9780801889752
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 08 Sep 2008
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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To modern sensibilities, nineteenth-century zoos often seem to be unnatural places where animals led miserable lives in cramped, wrought-iron cages. Today zoo animals, in at least the better zoos, wander in open spaces that resemble natural habitats and are enclosed, not by bars, but by moats, cliffs, and other landscape features. In Savages and Beasts, Nigel Rothfels traces the origins of the modern zoo to the efforts of the German animal entrepreneur Carl Hagenbeck. By the late nineteenth century, Hagenbeck had emerged as the world's undisputed leader in the capture and transport of exotic animals. His business included procuring and exhibiting indigenous peoples in highly profitable spectacles throughout Europe and training exotic animals-humanely, Hagenbeck advertised-for circuses around the world. When in 1907 the Hagenbeck Animal Park opened in a village near Hamburg, Germany, Hagenbeck brought together all his business interests in a revolutionary zoological park. He moved wild animals out of their cages and into "natural landscapes" alongside "primitive" peoples from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the islands of the Pacific.
Hagenbeck had invented a new way of imagining captivity: the animals and people on exhibit appeared to be living in the wilds of their native lands. By looking at Hagenbeck's multiple enterprises, Savages and Beasts demonstrates how seemingly enlightened ideas about the role of zoos and the nature of animal captivity developed within the essentially tawdry business of placing exotic creatures on public display. Rothfels provides both fascinating reading and much-needed historical perspective on the nature of our relationship with the animal kingdom.
Nigel Rothfels received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University and is director of the Office of Undergraduate Research at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the editor of Representing Animals.
