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A Different Nature: The paradoxical world of zoos and their uncertain future
by David Hancocks, University of California Press, 拢19.95/$35, ISBN
0520218795

鈥淭OO many zoos are clumsy monuments to mediocrity,鈥� says David Hancocks in
his scathing analysis of the scientific, aesthetic and educational standards of
most modern zoos.

Criticism always hits hardest when it comes from an expert. And Hancocks is
certainly that. He was director of two leading American zoos before moving to
Australia to take up his current job at the Open Range Zoo in Werribee,
Victoria.

Zoos are letting down both the captive creatures and the paying
public鈥攁nd the reason is not too little money or space but lack of
imagination, says Hancocks in A Different Nature. Bored animals in
sterile surroundings are more likely to reinforce misguided human notions of
superiority than inspire interest and respect for the natural world, he
suggests. Nor are zoos changing from being simple leisure parks to wildlife
conservation centres: only a handful of species have ever been saved from
extinction by captive breeding and then more by luck than human foresight.

Hancocks argues that zoos have to reinvent themselves. They should
concentrate less on collections of individual species in taxonomical order, more
on the complex interrelationships within ecological systems鈥攑ay more
attention to rarely seen indigenous species, instead of the large exotic
ones.

Zoos must also learn to cooperate, rather than compete, with other centres of
education about the natural world: botanical gardens, museums of natural history
and geology, and so on. This would help us to read the entire book of nature,
not just isolated chapters, he says. Only then can zoos fulfil their important
role as a 鈥減owerful advocate for conservation鈥�. It is a worthy and achievable
goal.