Full Description
A new and heartbreaking history of World War II as told through the shocking experiences of zoos across the globe.
As Europe lurched into war in 1939, zookeepers started killing their animals. On September 1, as German forces invaded Poland, Warsaw began with its reptiles. Two days later, workers at the London Zoo launched a similar spree, dispatching six alligators, seven iguanas, sixteen southern anacondas, six Indian fruit bats, a fishing cat, a binturong, a Siberian tiger, five magpies, an Alexandrine parakeet, two bullfrogs, three lion cubs, a cheetah, four wolves, and a manatee over the next few months. Zoos worldwide did the same. The reasons were many, but the pattern was clear: The war that was about to kill so many people started by killing so many animals. Why? And how did zoos, nevertheless, not just survive the war but play a key role in how people did, too?
A harrowing yet surprisingly uplifting chronicle, Kinder's World War Zoos traces how zoos survived the deadliest decades of global history, from the Great Depression, through the terrors of World War II, to the dawn of the Cold War. More than anything before or since, World War II represented an existential threat to the world's zoological institutions. Some zoos were bombed; others bore the indignities of foreign occupation. Even zoos that were spared had to wrestle with questions rarely asked in public: What should they do when supplies ran low? Which animals should be killed to protect the lives of others? And how could zoos justify keeping dangerous animals that might escape and run wild during an aerial attack?
Zoos in wartime reveal the shared vulnerabilities of humans and animals during periods of social unrest and environmental peril. World War II-era zoos offered people ways to think about and grapple with imprisonment, powerlessness, and degradation. Viewed today, the story of zoos during World War II can be read as an allegory of twenty-first-century crises, as the effects of climate change threaten all life across the planet.
A one-of-a-kind history, World War Zoos is the story of how the world's zoos survived the deadliest conflict of the twentieth century—and what was lost along the way.
Contents
Prologue: The Pandas at Pearl Harbor
Introduction: Two World Wars
Part I. The Thirties Experience
1. The Monkey's Lament
2. Hitler's Zoos
3. The Bear at Buchenwald
4. Zoos in an Age of International Cooperation
5. A Dress Rehearsal in Espańa
Part II. Opening Day Activities
6. Zero Hour
7. The Freeze and the Thaw
8. The Rape of the Zoo
9. American Zoos (Finally) Go to War
10. Helpless Gazelles and Beasts on the Hunt
Part III. Commissary and Administration (Staff Only)
11. Domestic Worries
12. Zoos without Keepers
13. Doing Their Bit
Part IV. Carnivore Encounters
14. Sacrificial Lambs
15. Bombing the Zoo
16. The Mask of the Chimpanzee
17. Beastly Liberations
18. KZ Zoo
Part V. Future Exhibits
19. Brave Zoo World
Epilogue: Baboon or Bear?
Acknowledgments of a Recovering Zoo-Lover
Notes
Index
