From royal menageries to the word "zoo"
A zoo keeps animals in enclosures for display and often for conservation breeding. The nickname zoo stuck after London's Gardens opened for science in 1828 and to the public in 1847; U.S. zoos alone now draw over 181 million visits a year.
The Greek roots mean study of animals; music-hall song "Walking in the Zoo" helped popularize the short form decades after Clifton Zoo saw it in print around 1847. Late-twentieth-century rebrands—"conservation park," "bio park" coined at Washington's National Zoo, or New York's 1993 shift to Wildlife Conservation Society "wildlife conservation parks"—try to shed the nineteenth-century cage stereotype. Welfare critics still challenge housing and visitor impacts even as conditions improve. Genealogy runs through menageries: a Hierakonpolis collection of about 3500 BCE held hippos, elephants, baboons; Assyrian and Zhou rulers kept gardens; Greek city-states and Alexander shipped specimens home; Rome's arena collections fared grimly.
Medieval England's Tower of London menagerie, begun under King John by 1204, took Frederick II's three leopards as a 1235 wedding gift to Henry III and later charged visitors three half-pence—or a cat or dog for the lions—before stock moved to Regent's Park. Moctezuma II's Tenochtitlan house of animals employed more than six hundred keepers until Cortés ordered its destruction. Schönbrunn in Vienna, ordered by Francis I in 1752 and opened to the public in 1765, is the oldest zoo still running. Paris's Jardin des Plantes zoo (1795) took Versailles beasts for research; Kazan's 1806 garden was Russia's first.
Stamford Raffles's Zoological Society of London founded the 1828 Regent's Park collection—the first scientific zoo—public from 1847 and template for city zoos worldwide, including the 1853 public aquarium. Carl Hagenbeck's 1907 Tierpark in Hamburg pioneered moated open enclosures, mixed-species exhibits, and geography-based layout. Philadelphia Zoo opened 1 July 1874 as "America's First Zoo"; by 2020 the U.S. counted 230 accredited zoos and aquariums in 45 states holding some 800,000 animals across 6,000 species (about 1,000 endangered), with a $230 million conservation budget and over 200 million annual visits. Tokyo's Ueno Zoo (1882) followed European models—and in 1943 was ordered to euthanize dangerous animals lest bombing free them.
Source: Zoo
