On a midweek afternoon, a group of children on an elementary-school outing crowds into the Toronto Zoo's Africa pavilion and swarms excitedly around the edges of the Gorilla Rainforest exhibit.
Sunlight streaks in through a high, domed ceiling on a 0.4-hectare space with a sloping floor, replicas of giant logs and a ring of tropical plants. The world's biggest indoor gorilla enclosure is home to Charles, a huge silverback male, two-year-old baby Johari and most of the zoo's eight lowland gorillas.
Constructed at a cost of $6-million and opened two years ago, the exhibit is one of the zoo's most popular attractions and a prime example of how many metropolitan zoos and aquariums have changed over the past three decades.
Once little more than menageries, the best of the world's largest zoos are now trying to reproduce environments that are increasingly being decimated in the wild. In many cases, these refuges have become the last places for people to see the planet's most endangered animal species.
For example, more gorillas and tigers now exist in captivity than in the wild. Some species, such as the rare Chinese alligator in the Toronto Zoo's Indomalayan pavilion, are among the last of their kind.
"Zoos," science writer Jake Page wrote in Zoo: The Modern Ark, "remain among the most crucial garrisons of life in a planetary war of attrition. . . ."
As Page points out in his book, they have not always been kind garrisons.
Ever since Stone Age tribes first dug pits to imprison and torment their fierce enemy and totem, the cave bear, man's relationship with captured animals has been a reflection of society's interaction with the natural world. It has been a long and, for the most part, sad history.
Egyptian pharaohs, Roman emperors, Mogul potentates and medieval European kings collected animals for blood sport or kept them in preserves reserved for the exclusive hunting of the noble classes. In Victorian times, exotic species were used as adornments in gardens or kept confined in cages for public amusement. In the mid-19th century, even in relatively enlightened countries such as England, it remained the custom to put bears in pits so that people, and sometimes dogs, could bait them.
As late as the early years of the 20th century, when much of the world's wilderness was still intact, there was little demand for zoos to recreate natural habitats. Animals were kept in prison-like, barren cages so visitors would have uninterrupted views of them. Many animals, especially those among the larger species, suffered from boredom-induced psychoses.
Mike Mackintosh, manager of Vancouver's Stanley Park Zoo from the late 1980s until it closed in 1996, once described zoos before the 1960s as "basically freak shows. The rarer, more bizarre animals you could collect, the better," he said.
The emergence of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s, along with a growing awareness of shrinking wildlife habitats and the rapidly growing number of species in danger of extinction, resulted in a shift in public attitude and a sea change in the operation of the largest modern zoos and aquariums. Huge sums of money have been invested in recent years to redesign facilities that now draw more visitors yearly in North America than sporting events do.
One of the earliest innovators in the "ban-the-bars" movement was the Toronto Zoo, today the third largest in size in the world - after the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park, and the North Carolina Zoo - with more than 5,000 animals. Replacing the old Riverdale Zoo, it opened in 1974 as a 287-hectare "park" that dispensed with taxonomic arrangements (all the big cats here, all the unguents there) in favour of a zoogeographic system that displayed a range of creatures together, more or less as they would be found in the natural world.
Its largest project, the 12-hectare African Savanna, for example, recreates a game reserve with grassland, waterholes, kopje rocks and overlooks. Animals such as elephants, lions, cheetahs, warthogs, baboons and river hippos seem to mingle with few visually apparent barriers. Other enclosures and pavilions replicate habitats from Canada, elsewhere in the Americas, Eurasia, Indomalaysia and Australasia.
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