Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Zoos!

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why zoos are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5(Alex’s old podcast hosting service required a minimum of 5 characters per episode title, and he's keeping that going for fun. So that’s why this episode’s title has an exclamation point)

Zoos, known for animals, famous for getting to visit the animals at the zoo. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why zoos are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt. And folks, not only am I not alone, I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden, Katie. Alex!

Hey, good to see you, buddy. Yeah, it's good to see you, too. I'm glad you're back from your break. Me too. And I am also so glad people picked such a wonderful topic for any. SIF episode. Thank you, Dacoup bear with support from lots of folks. Katie, what's your relationship to or opinion of zoos? You don't think about animals. You probably haven't heard of them or anything. I grew up in San Diego, so I went to one of the world's most famous zoos quite a bit when I was

growing up as an adult, the San Diego Zoo. Yeah. And I also, because I host a animal podcast, a creature feature, I get asked a lot what my opinion is on zoos. It really comes down to the zoos because some zoos are basically animal prisons. They're not very good. They don't have adequate space for animals. And so a lot of like roadside zoos are terrible. You just can't like put a wild animal in a small cage and call it a day. And I don't see any value to that.

Zoos like the San Diego Zoo and other zoos, there are plenty all across the U.S. in the world that do have adequate housing and care for their animals, I think are actually really important. They both do a lot of things like practically in terms of conservation and also in terms of education for the public. So I'm very much pro-good zoo. I think there are a few animals that just can never realistically be kept in a zoo. One of them is elephants. They're just too big and they're too smart and their whole life is nomadic. It's not ideal to have elephants at a zoo. I know some zoos have elephants because they're rescued and I understand that and I think that's fine, but I don't think elephants should ever be bred in a zoo.

You don't find them much in zoos, but another one is orcas. It's the same same situation as whales. they're too big, they're too intelligent, and their lives revolve too much around, a nomadic lifestyle that a zoo cannot provide. They're highly social. Yeah, I don't know of any zoo that has orcas. I know that like SeaWorld, of course, infamously have them. So anyways, I would be against, say, breeding them and trying purposefully to keep them bred in a zoo.

There are some animals that it's good they breed in zoos like. because they really need the help. Oh, those goofy little giant fuzzballs. A bunch of voluntary celibates. I feel like this topic is really aimed for both of us because, yeah, you make your wonderful podcast creature feature. You grew up near what it turns out is the most visited. And as I understand it, by acclaim, top zoo in the U.S., San Diego Zoo.

And then I've talked about being a zoo tour guide at Brookfield Zoo and near, it's Brookfield, Illinois, it's near Chicago. I'm pretty in the tank for zoos. I'm pretty biased towards zoos. And I also, I was saying this somebody on Discord too, like when people say it's sort of like an animal jail, they're right. It's just, I think it's worth it. So that's my, like, they are stuck and it's hard to rewild most of them. And then also I think it's worthwhile overall. But it's like a Nordic animal chick.

for good zoos, not a U.S. carceral system. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And like my grandma Schmidt would get us a Brookfield Zoo membership every Christmas for the family. And then my mom would take me and my brother there, so we run around and wear ourselves out. Then I dreamed of being a tour guide. Then I was a tour guide. Me and my wife have gone to a zoo most every Thanksgiving, our whole relationship. I have like too many zoo associations and we'll just get into it, I think, as we go. I love them. I've never been to the Brookfield Zoo, but I have seen sort of like the general layout, a lot of the stuff. It looks like a good zoo to me. It seems like they have all the stuff.

Like, really, you just, there are some zoos that are just like, here's a cage with a tiger in it. And it's like, yeah, that's no, that's no good. But when a zoo really tries and cares about the animals and cares about their welfare, maybe it's not always ideal, but I don't, I don't think it's cruel. Thank you again, folks, for picking this. I'm so excited to talk about it. On every episode, we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics in a segment called Alex, you're a stats man, Alex, you're a stats man, Katie, you're a stats man. You keep all your numbers in a big brown stats inside a zoo.

What a stats to do. I like how the take on the lyrics to that song Make just about as much sense as the original Like, the original never made any sense to me This one in a way is even more clear Than the original Beatles song Almost everything on magical mystery tour is that way It's great

This is baby you're a rich man And thank you Paul Zorin for that suggestion Related to the topic, thank you Paul We have a new name for this every one week, please make them a salient way I can be as possible, submit through Discord or to siphot at gmail.com. And the first number this week is more than 8,600 species. Ooh.

That is the number of different animal species in zoos and aquariums accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which is mostly a U.S. organization. And it's wild because that's a lot. It is a tiny. It's a tiny. Yes. Yes. Comes back from her summer break, thinks I won't pick out the word wild.

Yeah, well, well. I thought naively I could just get away with that. But yeah, that's like a tiny fraction of the world's species. I would assume a lot of that is because a lot of zoos do have huge insect exhibits, which are actually one of my favorite parts of zoos, the bug house. They're so good. And insects alone, like, are there's so many species of animals. That's like a tiny fraction.

And that's still a ton of species. That's really impressive. It is truly because this is basically just the U.S. almost. The AZA, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums is an umbrella organization. It was founded in 1924. And it's not part of the government. It's not required by any laws. It's just helping 251 zoos and aquariums in 13 countries run well on like a set of voluntary

good standards. That includes zoos in 46 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. And then there's other versions of this organization in other countries. So if you're in what feels like a professional zoo, it's probably because of one of these umbrella organizations that nobody thinks about doing a bunch of good work. If there hasn't been like a cage with clearly what is a man who's naked painted to look like a tiger going rar, it's probably one of these accredited. And if there is that, it's my one-man show, Tiger Alex.

It's off, off, off, off, Broadway. I had to go very far away. They wouldn't let me. I feel like I've probably described someone's fetish, and I'm sorry. Oh, no. I didn't mean it. I really took it there because I made it. Me.

Yeah, and then the AZA also runs a lot of SSPs. SSPs are species survival plans. So that's a system of exchanging and breeding the members of more than 500 endangered species in zoos, again, just in their group. Then there's ASMPs, the Australasian Species Management Program, there's EEPs, the European AZA-X-C-2 programs. There's a bunch of different umbrella groups and then also basically logs of family trees and which animals are aware to try to breed endangered species as well as possible. And again, many, many thousands of species are successfully kept in zoos, and also zoos are skipping a lot of animals that are doing fine without captivity and are high-end numbers in the wild. So it's an impressive amount. Yeah, no, it's, I mean, this is kind of one of the great thing about zoos is that you do have a repertoire of the animal genome that is being cared for and protected.

It's kind of like a seed bank, right, for plants and stuff. But you can't just keep animals in suspended animation. So you've got to take care of them. And it's a nice thing to that the public then also gets to see them. A next quick number is 700 million people. 700 million people is approximate global annual attendance at zoos and also aquariums. Aquariums are basically just considered a specialized zoo. So zoos, aquariums, aviaries, everything else.

How they get that water to stay behind those bars, though, Alex. That's how they prevent the lion from drowning. It goes out of the bars and then. They keep throwing the fish back in. I love aquariums as well. Actually, my favorite aquarium is a smaller one in San Diego associated with the UCSD called the Birch Aquarium. It does not have any large whales or dolphins or anything like that, just a bunch of really cool fish and a great view of the ocean and like an artificial tide pool outside that you can like go and interact with respectfully. They don't want you grabbing and shaking the sea hairs, but it just, it's always been my favorite aquarium.

It's not that big. It's just really well maintained. Since my dad worked at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, I got to go, like, all the time. It was amazing. I'll bet we both grew up with just such good aquariums that SeaWorld was never like a consideration. Because Chicago has an excellent one called the Shed Aquarium right on the lake. What was your favorite part of the aquarium? Any time I wasn't feeling afraid.

Various phobias. But also. sincerely the they had beluga whales um wow and they're like neat and uh both brook field and the shed had dolphins and those are cool yeah yeah yeah i was i was kind of white knuckling the aquarium every time yeah man that was you want to know my favorite part of the aquarium alex you're not going to like this yeah the jellyfish area there was this uh it makes sense yeah like if you like them they are really cool yeah you're in the dark and there's these giant tanks full of these ethereal otherworldly beings.

They had a bunch of different Nidarians there, so they had like sea gooseberries that had this sort of like luminescence over their sides and stuff. And it just like beautiful, beautiful, surrounded by a jellyfish in the dark, which I assume is your worst nightmare. But for me, it was very soothing. Yeah, that's like the cut scene for when my character loses

in Mortal Kombat or something. Right. Like, they're fatalityed by jellyfish chef. You sit to jellyfish hell. This topic is so common in people's lives. Like, it's not that everyone gets to go, but another number here is 181 million zoo visitors just in the U.S. per year. And that's not unique visitors, but if it was unique visitors, that'd be more than half the U.S. population, probably more than a third of Americans go to a zoo or aquarium every year. And despite some of those except a few D.C. ones being expensive, people still make it happen.

Like, we just love zoos. The most visited U.S. Zoo is San Diego. The most visited European Zoo is apparently Berlin. The most visited Asian Zoo is in Singapore. And also the Guinness Book of World Records, they're never really a solid source of information. But for their records, they allow a looser definition of zoos. So they say the world's most popular zoo is the Animal Kingdom sector. of Walt Disney World in Florida, which has like a zookeeping element and there's animals there.

I really didn't know that. I've been once, there was like a pretty substantial collection of animals that's like not a ride or whatever. Yeah. And two next numbers to share kind of back to back, the two next numbers are 22 California condors and only several hundred American bison. Those are the estimated low points of each of those animal. populations. And they are at least two of the species that have objectively, definitely been saved partly through zoo efforts. Yeah. Yeah, which is wild because, like, I'm going to keep saying wildallics and you have to calm down about it. Because, like, it's not like, as long as you

have a male animal and a female animal, that population can be saved. Like, it's freaking Noah's arc. It's usually too late by that point because the gen... That's enough genes, right? It's probably not enough. Like, if Noah's Ark was real, like, the genetic bottleneck would be so crazy. Yeah. What was God thinking? Come on.

Stupid Arc. Yeah. But. It's almost like it's a metaphor or a parable or something. Yeah, yeah. Right. No, couldn't be. But, yeah, the, the, you really do need a robust genetic population for most animals.

Some animals can get surprisingly by because they have weird genetic shenanigans. Cough, jellyfish, cough. Monsters, they're monsters. Yeah. Like asexual reproduction. But it's an incredible feat to go from like, you know, a few dozen individuals to actually bringing the population back successfully. Like that's, it's hard to understate how impressive that is. Yeah.

Especially with condors. It's such a amazing. story of especially modern conservation, apparently in the year, 1982. So not long ago, in 1982, biologists estimated that there were only 22 California condors left and began bringing as many into zoos as possible and then bred them, rewilded a bunch of them. There's now hundreds of them in the wild. They managed to avoid the problems with like a human raising a condor and having the condor imprint on humans by making these amazing condor hand puppets

that were very realistic that they used to feed these baby condors. Whooping cranes is another example. It's very funny with them because it's like people with the whooping crane hand puppet but then they walk around with sort of a sheet over the rest of their bodies because they're like feeding

and trying to teach the young whooping cranes stuff. And so it's it's very funny. But it's surprisingly effective. And they did it. There's now hundreds of California condors in the wild. They, of course, still need support. But without the efforts of zoos specifically, that wouldn't have happened. And then much earlier in history, around the 1890s, the estimate was only several hundred American bison,

which was down from a peak of at least 30 million individuals. And zoos in particular, the Bronx Zoo in New York, working with parks like Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota came together to bring back the bison. And so now a lot of zoological associations in the U.S., the logo might have a bison or feature that. And yeah, that's another zoo thing. They also might do a lot of their conservation effort off the property. My favorite number there, because it's a Brookfield thing, the number is the year 1970. Back in 1970, Brookfield began a research program studying Atlantic bottlenose dolphins in Florida. And according to the Chicago Tribune, unit is the longest ongoing study of a wild marine mammal population in the history of science.

They've since the 70s had an ongoing entire facility and team studying dolphins in Florida, even though if you're a zoo guest in Chicago, that doesn't entertain you other than maybe some signs about it? A lot of zoos are doing not just behind the scenes, but thousands of miles away conservation efforts. I mean, it sounds very similar to museums as well, like natural history. Museums. You're really only seeing a fraction of their collection that's presented throughout the museum. There's so many other specimens behind the scenes and so much research that happens behind the scenes. It's equally interesting, but they just, they simply can't just put a

researcher on display going through an archive of thousands of birds. That just doesn't really work. Watch, watch the researcher feeding at noon and then a keeper brings him subway, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Like, here's your sandwich. Turkey's a little dry. But, like, with the, with the dolphin study, I'd be curious here because, like, a lot of the 70s studies on dolphins were pretty wild. Like, do dolphins like jazz? Can we teach a dolphin to talk?

What happens if we stick a very attractive woman in a hotel room with a dolphin? None of those are huge exaggerations of real studies they did with dolphins. It'd be funny if the only longitudinal long-term information was about whether dolphins like disco and what dolphins think of Jimmy Carter, you know, just very 70s stuff. It'd be really funny. Like, we found out that dolphins are all staunch Republicans. They never heard about Watergate. Never.

Also, they like water. So, you know, they're for it, actually. Another wonderful animal conservation thing in zoos is, of course, Zoo Babies. One exciting number there is November 2024, this past November when we're taping. That is when the Edinburgh Zoo

in Scotland trash-talked the Kao-Kiao Open Zoo in Chonburi, Thailand. Trash-talked it. Because each of them had a baby pygmy hippo. Oh, wow. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, and Edinburgh really

came for the queen here because Edinburgh... Yeah, who comes? for moo dang yeah edinburgh had a new baby pygmy hippo who they named haggis and they did a social they did a social media post titled moo dang who dang introducing haggis if you want your cute baby hippo to really catch on might i suggest basically any other name except haggis i think i think they were doing the it's so scottish and gross it's cute attempt but i don't I'm not sold on naming a baby hippo haggis.

You know? Yeah. And I also assume haggis is less popular than Moudang because I hadn't really heard of haggis before looking this up. So I think Moodang won. But also the Kao Kiao Zoo refused to fight. They just replied saying that both hippos are adorable. And Edinburgh replied with what they called a notzap style apology of quote,

we were wrong to pit haggis and mu-dang against each other I mean it's true like why are we pitting these hippos against each other is haggis a boy uh oh it's a girl it's a girl you know what this it's 2025 we could still have juliet and julia with these two hippos two houses alike in dignity scotland and thailand

They even have land in the name, you know? Very similar. They do, yeah. This was a rare case of anybody creating any conflict around zoo babies. Usually just the world is thrilled with them one after another because of all the things about social media that are good, the best one might be easier access to zoo babies. It's great. Yes. One leader in that was a different hippo species in 2017, a Nile hippo at the Cincinnati Zoo gave birth to a baby.

six weeks prematurely, and the world happily followed the successful work to get that pre-me hippo through her first months, and then also enjoyed her activities. Her name is Fiona. This hippo I've heard of. Fiona is pretty world famous at the Cincinnati Zoo. Baby animals are mostly universally cute. Some of them come out looking heinously ugly, especially bird babies, but I still, there's something about how ugly they are that is also cute to me. So I love pretty much any baby animal. One prime example of the funny-lookingness becoming cute was a baby penguin recently named Pesto, who was enormous and had funky feathers.

Oh, I'm aware of Pesto. I've been following Pesto. Huge. And so there's a zoo baby for everybody. Go look up your favorites. It's great. It's just a joy. I also want to shout out zoo.

Moms. It's a less, I think, celebrated element, but they're a bunch of exciting famous zoo moms all over the world. And one of the first famous ones the year is 1996. Because in 1996, a Western lowland gorilla named Binti Jua saved the life of a three-year-old human. This is one of the Brookfield Zoo stories that was also world news. They have a guerrilla enclosure at their tropic world exhibit where guests are pretty far. above the animals. And so a three-year-old boy fell into it and was knocked unconscious. Binti Jua physically shielded him from any other guerrillas until keepers rescued him. And she also did that while her 17-month-old gorilla baby was on her back. And so it was like a thrilling animal motherhood and also protecting a human story for the world. Yeah, that's amazing. And to be clear, like the other gorillas might not have done anything to to the toddler, because they were probably really curious, but she probably had some instinct of like, no, no, this is very delicate, like, because their curiosity could, you know,

really severely hurt or even kill a human child. Yeah, just delicate. Pretty incredible that not only is there that capacity for empathy, an understanding of the situation, but just the variability in responses, right? Like you have these, some girls really excited. Maybe they want to play in a way that might be harmful. And this other girl who has maybe the, the awareness or the personality where she understands to keep the other ones away. It just shows a really remarkable type of intelligence.

And, yeah, and we see it in a bunch of different ways, too, and a bunch of other animal species with their own babies in zoos. And two amazing stories of that are from this partial year, 2020. One is that in April 2025, there was a 5.2 magnitude earthquake that shook the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. And the African elephants, the five adults in the enclosure hurried to form a protective circle. Their young got in the middle. And I think that was a known behavior, but people were excited to have footage of it in that cool way. Yeah. Different story here is from the Philadelphia Zoo in February 2025.

the two oldest residents of the Philadelphia Zoo are Galapagos tortoises, a male named Abrazzo, and a female named Mommy. And ironically, Mommy was not a mom yet until 2025. She laid 16 eggs resulting in four baby Galapagos tortoises, and she did that at the approximate age of 100. Wow. First time mom at 100. They live such a long time. And then the fact that their fecundity doesn't really go down that much with age is, yeah, bonkers. Yeah, truly.

Yeah. And the Smithsonian Magazine article says they usually live to around 200. So this is definitely like middle age and a normal breeding age of 100. And also those tortoises have been in the care of the Philadelphia's use since the early 1930s. Wow. So many generations of human zookeepers made those babies happen. It's cool. Yeah.

I wonder what did it, like, why this was the year, like, you know, finally warmed up enough to, it's like, you know, after like a hundred years together, I think I can tolerate you enough to have a baby. It is, they're almost like ants or something from Lord of the Rings. Like the decision making process is very ent moot for tortoise babies, I think. Yeah. It takes them a week to decide what they want for dinner. And it's leaves. It's leaves again. And it's always leaves.

And our last number before takeaway is it's the year 20094 BC. So more than 4,000 years ago, 2094 BC. That's the oldest record of a ruler like acquiring animals for a private zoo. And essentially the oldest record of zookeeping in human history that we found. So where was this? And it was a guy named the Great King Shulgia, who was the ruler of a Sumerian empire in ancient Mesopotamia. He was mostly in the city of Ur. It's really hard for me to respect a king whose name is Shulgia.

I don't know why. It doesn't inspire fear or awe. It's just kind of a cute name. Like, here comes old king. Shulgear. Yeah, I'm completely with you. I was not into it when I read it. I was like, okay.

I guess he added great to the title of King. Jaze you, that. One key source this week is the book, The Modern Arc, The Story of Zoo's Past, Present, and Future. That's by author and NPR journalist Vicki Croke. She says that we think exotic animal collecting started around 5,000 years ago,

because we had the conditions of large cities and centralized governments and wealthy rulers who would assemble that for their own personal enjoyment. We think just various civilizations around the world could do that around 5,000 years ago. And the oldest record of it is clay tablets saying that Shulgi of Ur purchased lions and maybe some other species for his private collection. So we also think lions are one of the first zoo animals in history. I mean, lions seemed to have throughout history this sort of universal awe-inspiring effect on people. Yeah.

And like to the point where people would try to be drawing them in medieval times in the Middle Ages without having ever seen one and just making these terrible, terrible drawings of weird dog-looking things. And then also, before the Colombian exchange in Europe, Asia, Africa, apparently one of the other top zoo animals was giraffes, and there's a few thousand years of rulers really trying to get a giraffe. And it started with 1490 BC, the Egyptian pharaoh queen had ships at this pharaoh queen, she arranged the first recorded expedition to specifically collect animals for a private zoo. And we think she brought the first giraffe to Egypt. And then, like, jumping a few thousand years later, various European countries recorded their first giraffe to come into their zoo and, like, massive crowds and public spectacle about it. I mean, I think that's remained the same, right? Giraffes and lions are probably some of the most popular animals for a zoo.

Like, when you look at, when you look at zoo brochures and things, like, you're usually seeing, like, a church. or a lion on there, if the zoo has giraffes or lions? Yeah, the height and everything. And, yeah, it's just great. And so they were spread, you know, the Egyptians, the Romans, everybody was trying to get giraffes to look at if they didn't live near them. And we think pretty much worldwide, Zhao Dynasty China and the Triple Alliance Aztecs, many different rulers were just the only people making zoos.

And another source this week is a book called Zoo, a history of zoological gardens in the West. It's co-written by Eric Perritte and Elizabeth Hardin-Fugé, who are professors at a university in Leone, France. And they say that there's a weird couple thousand years of not just royal private zoos in various places, but also they would really rise and fall with the personal interest in animals of each ruler.

Right. Like, it's not like the zoo that you. your city always has. It's a situation where either a ruler would inherit a huge zoo and just not be that big of an animal person and let a lot of them go or not inherit a zoo and build a zoo real fast. Yeah. I mean, you're just at the, you're at the mercy of the whims of your ruler. Maybe you have a ruler who's like super into Yu-Gi-O cards. And it's like, no more zoo. We're all into Yu-Gi-O cards now. And then they're kids like, my dad liked Yu-Gi-O. I like giraffes. And then they get a bunch of giraffes, and then you trade drafts for Yu-Gi-O the next generation.

It's just a cycle, you know, giraffe, Yu-Gi-O. Yeah. And you as the, even as the land of gentry, just kind of have to sit back and let the whims of the ruler take precedent. Oh, there's been a regime change. Put our Yu-Gi-O stuff away. Get the giraffe out. We got to, it flips, the fad flipped.

Ah, man. Just get the dust off the, get the giraffe out of the closet, dust it off. And yeah, and Beret and Herdwan Fugier, they, say that maybe the most amazing example of this royal fad switching is the last three major French kings, Louis the 14th, 15th, and 16th. Because they reigned for nearly 150 years put together. They each had a very long, many decades reign. Louis the 16th was killed by the French Revolution, otherwise he would have gone longer. Right. And Louis the 14th, known as the Sun King, he loved animals and enthusiastically assembled probably the largest zoo of its time at Versailles, basically for himself and a few friends.

Yeah. And then Louis the 15th was only sort of into it, and Louis XVIth had no interest, basically never went. Do you think if Louis the 16th had like opened the zoo up to the public, among other things, like making sure they had enough to eat? I think that might have given him a pretty good chance of not getting, you know, his head chopped off. Because like if he's like, look, guys, free zoo day for the public and also maybe some food. And then I think, you know, he might have smoothed things over. That is pretty much an argument. Like, it wouldn't have prevented the French Revolution, but it gets us into takeaway number one.

Modern zoos were invented by French revolutionaries in Paris and a French-born emperor in Vienna. That's really interesting. I kind of, because I was going to mention the fact that Versailles, like, opened up to the public after the revolution. Like, at first they were going to destroy it out of anger. Yeah. And then some of them were like, oh, wait, hang on. This is actually pretty sick.

Like, what if we just made this basically a big museum for the public to be able to see? Was that kind of like where, like did they open up the zoo to people at that point? They basically relocated it because also Versailles outside the city. But they basically put the animals they could gather into a former royal botanical garden in Paris. Wow. And that was the basis of the first Paris Zoo. Yeah. And in a very separate way, a very absolutist and royal leader accidentally established a public Vienna zoo.

And those are the two key zoos of most modern zoos happening from there. I mean, I'm glad that the revolution sort of like had the wherewithal not to hold all the animals accountable for the royals. Because like how would you even get a giraffe in a guillotine? and what part of the neck would you go for? Yeah, if a rebel tries to figure out that problem, they clearly just like cutting people's heads off. It's not ideological. They're just a serial killer at that point.

So this is the two weirdly separate, but also dovetailing stories of the Paris Zoo and the Vienna Zoo because they both came out of movements to make zoos for the public. right like a zoo should be something that benefits the public and the previous nearly 4,000 years zoos were for a few rich guys or just one rich guy yes most of politics and society has changed in this direction and zoos are an example of it I mean it was like a modern version of it would be like uh what's his name al chapo right like he had a bunch of animals that he kept around And later in the show, we'll talk about Pablo Escobar, had a zoo.

Yeah, Pablo Escobar as well. Yeah. Like, he had basically his own private zoo. Yeah, that in a few weird ways remains modern. But, yeah, this basically the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution did a lot to change that. Yeah. Really, like, ethic of zoos for the public and for science and for conservation, like a few good things all at once. that is really from the late 1700s in Paris and Vienna.

And the separate way it happens in Paris is that there's a French Revolution, especially if folks heard the recent episode about the Bastille, we describe hunger and also inequality as to key drivers of the entire French Revolution. And opening up the zoo wouldn't have prevented the whole revolution or something, but revolutionaries like the Jacobins specifically held up Louis XVI's animal menagerie because the word zoo didn't exist yet. These were usually called animal menageries. I do like menagerie as a word a lot. It's quite good. Yeah. And so French. So, you know, makes sense for them. They held up Louis XVI's menagerie as one of the most

disgusting and wasteful royal things, mainly on the grounds that the animals were well fed while most French people starved. Yeah. It was an inequality thing. It's got to be so frustrating for you to be an angry French person who can barely feed your family and you're seeing your own children starve and then you're hearing about, you know, some giraffe getting fed macaroons. Like, that's not a tenable situation. Right, right. And also word got out that Louis XVIth was fully continuing to fund his grandfather and great

grandfather's zoo without any real interest in it. Yeah. To the point that apparently his courtiers and staff made a new map of Versailles in 1781, just so people like the king could know where everything was. But he was so uninterested in his zoo, they didn't even put it on the map of his own palace when it's a zoo just for him. So people were really mad. They were like, why are you feeding lions and not humans in this country? The switch that flips is basically all of the positives of a zoo. are positive if we make them for everybody instead of just one rich guy.

And so that's how the French co-invented the modern zoo in Paris. The one pushback was that a lot of the revolutionaries wanted to maintain the main botanical garden in Paris without letting animals ruin it. They just worried that like animals would trample the rare plants. Right. But once they sorted that out, they moved many of the Versailles menagerie animals to the Jardine du plant, which just means botanical garden. Plant garden.

They turned what was a waste of royal wealth into a pillar of public good. They said this demonstrates Florence's global influence. It's for public education. It's for edification. It's for entertainment. And within a couple of years, the French revolutionaries were using their military partly to gather new animals for their new zoo in the middle of Paris. Wow.

I mean, they must have really freaking love those animals. They were really big fans, yeah. And apparently they ate a few of them. And also, but the ones that they could move easily, they moved. They were very hungry. They were very hungry. Yeah, to be fair. They did not have cake, which was Mary Antoinette's fatal mistake.

And yeah, and then separately because it's totally. monarchical, but otherwise for similar reasons. The Archduke of Austria and Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna sort of accidentally started a public zoo before the French did. Yeah. It was initially a new menagerie, but it was set up by a guy named Franz Stephan, who was initially just born as the Duke of Lorraine. It's a French and sort of Germanic duchy, but he married his second cousin who was Maria Teresa. They did that all the time back then, guys. Everyone calmed down.

Right, like second instead of first is pretty good for the 1700s. That was pretty good. That's like getting a little far afield of the family bloodline there. Yeah, starting to fork the tree, great. So he married into an incredibly powerful royal line and got to be sort of the main person, partly through patriarchy. So Franz Stephan, this Frenchish nobleman, is suddenly Archduke of Austria and the Holy Roman Emperor, and he's living in Europe's second biggest palace after Versailles. It's called Schoenbrun. It's in Vienna. And this is 1752. So he is an absolute monarch of a huge

amount of Europe. And he says, I really like animals in building a zoo for myself. But unlike a lot of other menageries, Franz Stephan's next couple, heirs not only kept it up, but also subscribed to a philosophy called Enlightened Absolutism. Interesting. Go on. The goal is basically, what if all of our dictators were just perfect people, right? Like, what if they were just incredibly generous and we just get lucky every time? I mean, that would be great. Yeah.

His heirs, as soon as the 1770s, start allowing a few hours. of public visitors to their animal collection, if the visitors wear formal clothing. You know, it was like extraordinary limited just for the rich zoo visiting. And it is a zoo to this day. The former menagerie of Schoenbrun Palace pretty seamlessly morphed into being a public Vienna zoo.

Right. And when you look at the zoo map, you can tell it used to be a Versailles-type garden. Yeah. And just for the record, these Vienna guys, They didn't get their heads chopped off, did they? They did not. Yeah, yeah.

Well, see, you know, give the people a zoo probably food, too. That's, I feel like I'd be a very good enlightened to absolutist because I'd be like, first of all, we should be giving people cake. I think they'd be super into that. And then also a zoo. And, you know, that's my pitch to be voted. empress. It was basically two completely different governments with the same theoretical ideals. The French Revolution was liberty, equality, fraternity, and the Austrian archduke was,

I have all of the power, and I will do liberty, egality, fraternity for you guys, except that you never get any power. And so, you know. Yeah, I promise to be good. I promise. I'll be really good. Yeah. And also not really egalitarian anything, because we're still having an ability and stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll be good to, you know, the top, like, 10% of you. But both those from separate routes, enlightenment-driven zoos in Paris and Vienna, templated a lot of the rest of the world. Like, you have waves of zoo building in England, the Netherlands, Belgium, German-speaking places, later the U.S. after the Civil War there. and especially the layout of zoos, a lot of zoos have big, broad paths and lots of wonderful plants, too. That's specifically inspired by the Paris Zoo and the Vienna Zoo both being built in royal gardens and, like, imitating that shape and that landscaping.

And that also led to the word zoo, because instead of calling them menageries, they called them zoological gardens or zoological parks. Because it's the science of zoology plus what's obviously a garden or. park because it was recently and then we shortened that to zoo but that's where the word comes from Paris and Vienna botanical gardens if it's a good one those are awesome I love them so much they're really great like when I was a kid they sounded so boring as a kid but then you go and you're surrounded by the weirdest funkiest plants I felt the same yeah I'm only starting to appreciate them now and I was walked through them sullenly before yeah yeah it really only took about 150 years for zoos to go from the private menagerie of one royal to a public

institution for public good, especially because rich people funded a lot of them initially and then didn't want to keep it up. The Paris and Vienna origins are sort of unique. A more common thing happened in London. In 1822, rich people and upper middle class people in London created the zoological Club of the Linnaean Society. And they founded a London Zoo, but also made it exclusive to the members of the society who paid for it. Right. For about a century, early 1800s into the early 1900s, a lot of zoos were either from

a philanthropic club or a joint stock company, basically a corporation, that would restrict it to just the people who paid for it. But then their kids and grandkids and great-grandkids didn't want to keep paying for it. And then those zoos basically got transition to public governments. And then public governments doubled down the focus of science and education and the other positive things. Like it became seen as a pillar like libraries and museums of society. Yeah.

So it's like they probably started out just a bunch of top hat wearing guys going around poking tigers with their ostentatious canes. And then, you know, now it's now it's a lot better. Yeah, and it's a middle step that kind of made some sense. Zoo membership now is just your family gets one. But before it was, I'm a member of this zoo because I pay for it, like a gym or something, you know? Right, right. There just weren't enough descendants of those rich people who wanted to keep feeding the lions personally all on their own. And then it became public.

And that has influenced every listener's experience of zoos, Paris, Vienna, and then the progression from there. Right, because they were still modeled after what. those original zoos were like. Exactly, yeah. And folks, this is a mega takeaway in so many numbers in zoos. We're going to come back with a few more short takeaways after a quick break. All right. Folks, we're back and we have two further takeaways about zoos.

They're also going to be, I would say, much stranger than the previous chunk of the show. The first one is Takeaway number two One guy in Hamburg, Germany established the worst ever concept for a zoo and separately established one of the best ideas for zookeeping.

All right, let me guess underwater zoo and then best idea, all the animals get little hats. When you said underwater zoo, I thought about like the glass that you watch the polar bears and dolphins through in the water. I was like, what's the bad idea? Yeah.

What's the bad idea? Right, right, right. No, the ideas are even better and even worse. And this is the story of Carl Hagenbeck. That's the name. No one knows his name, but Carl Hagenbeck almost made zoos a major crime against humanity. And then also improve them in a way that most of us enjoy to this day. And I want to be clear that both those ideas happen separately.

like we didn't need the bad thing for the good thing. The bad thing was just bad. Uh-oh. The bad thing was human zoos. He exhibited ethnicities of people to white Europeans. That's not good. I was afraid this was coming. Yeah, I've actually read a little bit about this.

That's a, oh boy. Anyways, continue, Alex. Yeah, it's like important and we'll just lay out what it is. And then his completely separate good idea, people call it stuff like, The Hagenbeck Revolution, like, it truly changed zookeeping. The short version of it is until relatively recently, like into the early 1900s, most zoos just displayed their animals inside of small metal cages, like metal bars. Yes.

Yeah. And Hagenbeck's idea was, one of the main features is what's called architectural ditches, which is where you give your animal a big open space. Maybe they want more space because many animals do. but it's a big open space and then the separation between you and them is a moat or an open space like just a big gap that they can't cross

and then it's better for everybody involved it's improved every zoo ever yes yeah for sure and he just had both those ideas separately and is kind of the worst and best person in the history of modern Seuss but really just the worst I think somebody else could have come up with the ditches

I feel like that was an inevitable innovation. Yeah. And I hear and the butt is coming and it is a very large butt. And Carl Hagenbeck also bothered to innovate zoos because he's one of the first people ever to inherit a zoo without being royalty. His dad was in the zoo business. And they were not wealthy people. Carl Hagenbeck was born in 1844 in Hamburg. his father was both a fishmonger and an animal enthusiast.

A fishmonger sells fish. They don't catch the fish. And one day some fishermen gave Klaus Hagenbeck some live seals that just got caught and trapped in their nets. And Klaus already owned a few other exotic pets. And so he built wooden tubs for the seals, a few other displays for other animals, and charged people one shilling to look at it. One shilling CSEO. One shilling CISO. Yeah, yeah.

And this was the 1850s. So, like, Paris and Vienna and a few cities have modern-ish zoos, but this major German city of Hamburg did not yet. So Klaus was filling the vacuum with, like, an amateur, fly-by-night zoo. So he was like, he was like seal king. Yeah, seal king, basically, yeah. And then in 1859, he takes his 14-year-old son, Carl, and says, you're not going to school. You now run a zoo.

Yeah. You know how excited I would have been to hear those words when I was a kid? I know. It would be great. I dreamed of hearing that all the time. You know, no more school. You run a zoo now. Yes.

And so then Carl is like a zoo small businessman. He really needs the zoo to keep making money. Otherwise, he'll go broke and it all folds. And there's a German economic downturn in the 1870s. And then he commits a crime against humanity to try to solve it. He starts a human zoo. Yeah. And if folks have heard the passive episode about World's Fairs, we talk about some

World's Fairs also doing that for what they thought were positive scientific principles of eugenics. And so in Hamburg, Carl Hagenbeck puts up really the first ever human zoo in 1875. Yeah. It's an exhibit of two families of indigenous Sami people from Scandinavia, along with tools, Sleds, dogs, and 31 reindeer, and, like, the public would watch the milk the reindeer at specific times, and this was a massive hit, and then he made more exhibits of more ethnicities. So this was, like, to be clear, like, this was separate from slavery, right?

Like, were these people enslaved, or were they sort of, this was more sort of, like, economic coercion? Great question. It's a mix of economic coercion, and apparently a few of the participants are considered to have been, like, actively into it. Like, this is better pay than I'd ever make. But that's still coercion to me, being kept in an exhibit. It doesn't seem like anyone was captured quite, but he did various exhibits of people. Apparently, one featuring Sudanese people was such a hit at Drew, 62,000 spectators in one day. he also failed to vaccinate or protect these people from European diseases and so many of the exhibit people died.

Oh, boy. It's just horrible, yeah. Oh, my God. It's like maybe he was taking better care of the animals than the people at that point. Because Jesus, like. Yeah, potentially. Yeah. And this also, to society's credit, this got pushback from jump.

Like, even the very first exhibit, people said, that's weird. Like, this is racist and negative. Yeah. But not enough people said that, and so crowds came. I feel like that is typically, like, when you hear about an thing that is atrocious from the past, particularly when it relates to, like, race, there usually are contemporaries who are like, this is messed up, who were just simply ignored. Yeah, yeah. And so Hagenbe, and then Hagenbeck kicked this off as a trend in zoos and world's fairs for about 30 years. The end came in the early 1900s and was also the all-time low point in U.S. Zoo History, because at the 1904 World's Fair, there was an exhibit of a man named Ojabenga from Central Africa.

And then two years later, the Bronx Zoo tried exhibiting him. And according to the Smithsonian, this experiment was halted following complaints and remains an isolated case. So that's the all-time low point in American Zoo history is that, you know, like a guy. guy named William Hornaday, who did a lot to save the bison, also exhibited Otabanga in a zoo, and that was part of the history of it. Well, because probably in a sick way, right, like the same kind of like care and the idea of like animal husbandry can extend to human beings if you don't see them as the same as yourself, right?

Like it's a, the paternalistic, I must be sort of the, the father of the land and the caretaker of the land can extend to people if you don't really see them as people. 100%. That was their thinking. And yeah, some of these worlds fair people especially were proud. They were like, look at what we're showing and educating people about race. And they were just wrong about race. And yeah, and then Hagenbeck received that message in his own time and especially toward the end of his exhibits going to. really poorly. Totally separately, he tries to improve the keeping of animals in zoos and does so. And one thing he did is help to lead the trend toward gathering animals by ecosystem rather than by taxonomy. Like instead of building a reptile house, you build an exhibit of animals in a place, including the reptiles there, and an exhibit of another ecosystem, including the reptiles and so on. Yeah. Which is the logic of a lot of zoos today. Like, at Brookfield, they had an old reptile house because that's old, and then their new exhibits were environments.

That's an ongoing trend. I think that's generally the structure of the San Diego Zoo, except for insects, because that's kind of hard. Yeah, the size is. Yeah. To integrate the insects into normal. I mean, they're there, but you can't see them. Oh, and Brookfield had a small mammal house, which was awesome. It's so good.

But it's the size, yeah. Just making exhibits work better. Hagenbeck did that four animals, and he became so committed to a whole new way of zookeeping that in the early 1900s he constructed a whole new zoo next to his previous zoo. And he opened Tier Park Hagenbeck in 1907, Tier Park means Animal Park. And it blew the world's mind with the first architectural ditches and open instead of cage exhibits for mostly the larger non-preditor animals initially. He also built a larger version of it a few years later called the Panorama Zoo.

The entire hook was, there's not bars between you and the animals, and the animals have at least a little more space. And that spread worldwide within a couple decades. It's a huge head idea. It's influenced every zoo you've ever been to. I mean, in addition to that being much better for the animals, it's a much more exciting experience for the person, right? Because you get to see them doing stuff.

and if not their natural environment, at least the facsimile of it. Yeah, really. It's simply great all around. And Carl Hagenbeck is an extraordinarily complicated person to have had that great innovation and spread it worldwide, just separately from doing horrible things. Yeah. It seems to be a pretty common theme throughout history. Like, oh, this guy did something really cool.

He hated women, though. And he's also a case of society doing a good job pushing back against his bad idea and running with his good idea. It's good that people all over the world shaped what he tried to do in a positive direction all around. Yeah. So good job, everybody. Good job protesting at the Bronx Zoo and so on when they tried to display a person. Good job for rejecting the idea, human zoo. Yes.

It's a low bar. It's a very low bar, but we managed to get over it. And yeah, and then our last takeaway about a completely different weird thing. Takeaway number three. The private zoos of Pablo Escobar and William Randolph Hearst accidentally established hippo and zebra populations in the Americas. Oh, whoa. I was aware that Hurst had weird animals around his... his very strange estate, and that a lot of them had kind of escaped.

Yeah, and it's left a population of more than 100 zebras near Highway 1 on the central coast of California. That's, wow. They're doing their thing out there. And then there's more than 100 hippopotamuses in Colombia because of the narco-terrorist and drug lord Pablo Escobar keeping hippos and then letting them get out. And like in the numbers in the beginning, we talked about ancient private zoos, royal private zoos, this is a way that modern weird rich guy private zoos can go. That desire that rich people have or even just eccentric people with enough money like Tiger King have to be like, you know what, I just want to have some chunk of exotic nature for me. Right. Yeah, yeah. And it gets so weird and can get weird in different ways of making money. William Randolph-Hurst's Media Titan, Pablo Escobar, Delt Drugs. Escobar was based in Medellin, amassed tens of billions of dollars. He's arguably the wealthiest criminal in human history. But one weird indicator of his wealth is one of his employees. In 2025, the Guardian interviewed Tierso Dominguez, who was one of his former airplane pilots. And just being one of Escobar's

airplane pilots, Dominguez claims to have owned 30 Lamborghinis. Wow. And each day when he put on his shirt, he would then select the car that matched the shirt to drive around. So anyway, Escobar truly outrageous wealth, and one thing he did is at his estate is set up a private zoo. And then also later in his run of crime, he opened it to the public to try to gain favor with ordinary Colombians against the authorities.

Like, this is my whole thing, right? If you don't want to, if you're really rich and powerful and you don't want to get got, you got to give people a zoo. Right, right. And like, Hearst never really did that because Hearst had the government on his side, partly by almost controlling the government in the United States. Right. So it's very different.

Yeah. Have you been to the Hearst Castle? No, I haven't. I heard of it. It's, I've been. It's very strange. It's like a bunch of different styles of architecture all mashed together, just a bunch of like weird opulence. I wouldn't say it's nice looking.

It's just kind of a bit of lunacy, a bit of rich lunacy where it's very gaudy, very, very strange. I think that was actually the only time I've seen. I believe I saw a condor on the drive up to it. That makes sense because apparently people see a lot of. of interesting wildlife in the area of Hearst Castle. It's a relatively remote part of California there. Yeah. Back to Escobar quick.

He gathered every exotic animal he could think of, but he also had a basically principle of large predators are too hard to keep, too much meat, too much security, which might be smart. I don't know. Yes. But so then he kept every large herbivore or won't eat a human that he could think of. He had zebras, giraffes, kangaroos, rhinoceroses, elephants, ostriches, and a set of four Nile hippopotamus's. I mean, a hippo, while not perhaps consuming the human, will certainly tear a human apart, given the chance. That seems to be part of the problem, because then Escobar eventually, he's killed by his enemies and the authorities.

His estate falls into ruin, but there's this huge five-year period where the estate is not controlled by Escobar because he's dead, but also nobody's watching the animals closely. And the least approachable, controllable animal he happened to gather was hippos. And during those five years, his four hippos took over an artificial pond, reproduced in it. And then that hippo population just got out, trampled farms, menaced people. and those hippos have exploded into a population of at least several dozen, possibly more than 200. The New York Times cites experts who claim that by 2035, the country of Colombia, might have more than a thousand hippos, all from this tiny four hippo gene pool from Pablo Escobar's zoo. It's so funny because invasive species are very common, but a hippo is like it's the funniest invasive species

because it's like, it's not good. Like, they are, it's not a good thing to just have wandering around. That's bad, yeah. I'm sure they have an impact on the environment, but also they're just high. They're so aggressive and they're enormous. That's kind of the all-around way people feel in Columbia today, apparently, because they're definitely an ecological menace. They devour too much plant life.

and then their feces and water spreads harmful bacteria and algae because it feeds on it. And in 2023, the government proposed sterilizing as much of the herd as possible to, like, wind it down that way, right? Good luck getting quick. Like, what are you going to do? Oh, all right. It's your job now to castrate this hippo. Good freaking luck. And apparently they have not begun because it's hard. The plan was to put like. Of course it's hard. Their stated plan was to put caches of vegetables in big paddocks and then let veterinarians sterilize the hippos from there. But come on. This is not going to work. Come on. And then also because hippos are basically funny and interesting, they're sort of a favorite local symbol in many places in Colombia. There's statues of hippos. And Escobar's former property is now a place people visit for fun. There's a little bit of a theme park.

and that includes a giant pink mascot hippo named Vanessa. Okay. Who, like, greets guests to Escobar's former estate. Well. So his weird zoo made Columbia a hippo country. There's no endemic hippos in the Americas. No, I mean, once your country's been taken over by hippos, you do kind of have to embrace it, I guess. That's kind of what people are saying, yeah.

They're like, I don't know, this is just part of the deal now. But it seems unsustainable, too. you like when the hippos come it's just like you just got to accept it yeah and then in a separate way that's happened with zebras on the central coast of california there are no endemic zebras in north america yeah no no kidding william randolph hurst the the pop culture touchstone is citizen cane that movie by orson wells is a fictionalization of hurst right basically an incredibly wealthy and sad at Newspaper Titan, who was also specifically known for sloppy and scandalous journalistic practices.

His newspapers are a major reason, maybe the reason the United States declared war on Spain in 1898 and seized colonial territories from Puerto Rico to the Philippines. He also failed to run for president in 1904. Late in life, he made public statements in favor of the Nazi party in Germany. And then along the way he's basically, he's basically Elon Musk. of the time. Yeah, and like he made a vast fortune doing different bad things to me. It's not drugs, but also he like swung American society with his media reach and would write

personal columns about why we should be more right wing and why Hitler's fixing Germany. And a lot of yellow journalism, right? Like a lot of just sort of tabloid. Yes. Like, you know, kind of like a Rupert Murdoch type. Made all media worse. Yeah, like where it's like here's something. it's not necessarily true, but it'll sell papers.

Hearst also liked animals. And so he builds this vast estate centering on a castle on the central coast of California. It's near a modern town named San Simeon. And it had a private combination ranch and zoo sprawling across tens of thousands of acres. Apparently, in order to get from the entrance of the estate to the castle, you had to drive five miles down a private road. Whoa. You've probably done it. I think so. I think that might have been where I saw the condor. But yeah, it's just like it's a

really long car ride to get from one point of the estate to the other. Yeah. And apparently this sparked both real stories and apocryphal legends about Hearst's wild exotic animals crisscrossing the road because they had some of the run of the place. And the wildest probably apocryphal story is that Winston Churchill visited, and when he tried to drive down the road, a giraffe was stubborn and got in the way. It was just this really weird place all around. Yeah, it's like the story I want to have happened, right? Like Winston Churchill just really flustered and irate because there's a giraffe in the road. Yeah, he like tries to feed it some of his champagne or something. Like, I don't know. I don't know what to do. It like, it like sort of like goes and snatches the hat off his head. Like, you know,

his cigar falls out in astonishment. The real weirdest thing is that Hurst, before he dies, starts to have money troubles. And so he starts selling or gifting animals in the late 1930s. His favorite was zebras, and he tried to keep the zebras. They stay in an enclosure, but then the fence gets knocked down in a storm. And before Hurst's remaining employees can handle it, some of the zebras get loose. And there's now a wild herd of more than 100 individuals near San Simeon. California.

That's, I've never seen those wild zebras, but, uh, I imagine there, there's something to look at, like, because I know there's like some wild horse populations in various parts of the U.S., but yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, that's crazy. It's basically another one of those, but in an invasive way and specifically from a private zoo and, according to UC Berkeley wildlife ecologist Justin Brisshares, the zebras might continue thriving there, the dry and hilly coastal ecosystem works for them. Yeah, it's kind of Savannah-like. Exactly.

And so their only trouble is really two weird predators. It's human hunters who say, hey, I could catch a zebra down the street, like, cool. Okay. And the other one is California has a long-running project to try to save its mountain lions. Yes. Which are endemic, and the zebras work for them as prey. Like, it works out. that's got to be so thrilling for a mountain lion like you're used to like okay another like

another deer another rat another rabbit and then you just get a whole a whole zebra right or you get too used to zebras and don't have any perspective and you're like ooh a bunny like you just are unlike all other mountain lions yeah yeah Folks, that's the main episode for this week. I'm so glad Katie is back from her summer break. And welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the Big Takeaways. Mega Takeaway number one.

Modern zoos were invented by French Revolutionaries in Paris. and a French-born emperor in Vienna. Takeaway number two, Karl Hagenbeck in Hamburg, Germany, established the world's worst concept for a zoo, and separately established one of the best modern practices in zookeeping. Takeaway number three, the private zoos of Pablo Escobar and William Randolph-Hurst

established hippo and zebra populations in the Americas. And then a really enormous numbers section this week about U.S. and global zoos, the most popular zoos in the world, the most amazing zoo babies and zoo moms in recent news, and also the most ancient zoos in human history. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the theory that the modern U.S. state of Florida is a giant informal zoo. Visit sifod.fod.fun for that bonus show for a library of more than 21 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. It's special audio, it's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation.

Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week include two excellent scholarly books. One is called The Modern Arc, the Story of Zoo's Past, Present and Future, that is by author and NPR journalist Vicky Croke. The other is called Zoo, a History of Zological Gardens in the West. co-written by Eric Barrette and Elizabeth Hardin-Fugier, who are professors at Universite Jean-Moulon in Leone, France.

Another key source this week is Smithsonian Magazine, a feature by Kara Parks, about the zoo in Vienna at the former Schoenbrun Palace, also a feature by Shoshi Parks, about Carl Hagenbach. She cites experts like historian Nigel Rothfels of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. And then lots more resources from the,

New York Times, C-Net, the Big Think, the Guardian, and other trusted journalism. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie-Lenape people, and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategook people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing

stories and resources about native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly, incredibly fascinating, by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 174 that's about the novel Frankenstein. And fun fact there, the teenager Mary Shelley was able to write Frankenstein despite being trapped by a volcanic winter and surrounded by a five-sided love triangle, which I call a love pentagon, because what else would you call it?

Anyway, I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budoz band. Our show logo is by artists Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for audio mastering on this episode. Extra extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network Of artists-owned shows Supported directly by you.