97 Fun Facts About Zoos and Zookeeping

In which city is Tiergarten Schönbrunn, the world's oldest zoo, open since 1752?

Vienna: Emperor Francis I had the menagerie laid out at Schönbrunn Palace with enclosures fanning out from a central pavilion, where the imperial couple at times took breakfast with the animals in view.

Which training method lets zookeepers draw blood from a lion's tail without putting the cat under anaesthesia?

Positive reinforcement: keepers reward each small step with food until the cat lies against the mesh and slides its tail through by choice, sparing it the stress of being knocked out for a check-up.

What does the accrediting body AZA stand for?

Association of Zoos and Aquariums: formed in 1924 as an offshoot of a park executives' institute, it makes every member zoo earn its accreditation again every five years.

The vaquita, target of a failed 2017 captive-rescue attempt, is what kind of marine mammal?

Porpoise: the vaquita, the smallest member of the whale and dolphin order, is vanishing because it drowns in gillnets set illegally for the totoaba, a fish of about its own size.

Under which programme, launched in 1981, do AZA zoos pair and swap threatened animals to keep captive populations genetically healthy?

Species Survival Plan: each one issues breeding and transfer recommendations for the animals it covers, which is why a zoo's tiger may be sent across the country to meet a chosen mate.

Which extinct, half-striped relative of the zebra was photographed alive at London Zoo in the 1860s?

Quagga: a mare at London Zoo was photographed between 1863 and 1870, hunters finished off the wild herds within a decade, and the last captive animal died in Amsterdam in 1883.

'Zoo' is short for what?

Zoological garden: the clipped form began as a nickname for London's Zoological Gardens and caught on when music-hall star Alfred Vance sang 'Walking in the Zoo'.

Which zoo, billed as America's first, was chartered in 1859 but did not open until 1874?

Philadelphia Zoo won its charter in 1859, but the Civil War stalled it for fifteen years, so other American cities were showing zoo animals before its gates opened.

Which equine, once extinct outside captivity, has been returned to Mongolia's Hustai National Park since the 1990s?

Przewalski's horse vanished from the wild, and every one alive today descends from about a dozen wild-caught animals bred in zoos, the stock that later let herds go home to Mongolia.

What term do zookeepers use for stimulating an animal's brain through its physical and social surroundings?

Environmental enrichment: keepers hide, bury or scatter food, fit puzzle feeders and bring in new scents so that animals have to search and forage much as they would in the wild.

The oldest known zoo, some 5,500 years old and dug up at Hierakonpolis, was in which country?

Egypt: the animals were buried in the rulers' cemetery at Hierakonpolis, and broken bones that had healed show that people had kept them alive in captivity.

Ancient writers say 9,000 animals died in the hundred days of games that opened which Roman arena under Titus?

Colosseum: Cassius Dio puts the slaughter at nine thousand beasts and says women joined the hunters, while Suetonius has five thousand animals of every kind shown in a single day.

Carl Hagenbeck's Tierpark, which pioneered open, bar-free animal panoramas in 1907, stands in which German port city?

Hamburg: Hagenbeck, an animal dealer, built his park at Stellingen on the city's edge and showed polar bears and big cats in open landscapes, a layout that zoos around the world went on to copy.

In 1993 the body running New York's zoos changed its name to what?

The Wildlife Conservation Society began in 1895 as the New York Zoological Society, set up largely by members of the Boone and Crockett Club to open a free zoo and preserve wildlife.

In 1853 London Zoo opened the world's first public what, stocked by the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse?

Aquarium: Gosse coined the word itself for the zoo's new Fish House, and his book on keeping sea creatures at home, out the next year, set off a Victorian craze for parlour tanks.

Which Bedfordshire zoo did London's Zoological Society open in 1931 on a derelict farm, to give its larger animals open paddocks?

Whipsnade proved its worth within a decade: when bombs threatened Regent's Park in the Second World War, the society sent its most valuable animals out to the country zoo for safety.

The San Diego Zoo grew out of animal exhibits abandoned after which event?

The 1915 Panama–California Exposition left caged animals in Balboa Park; as surgeon Harry Wegeforth told it, hearing its lions roar made him say San Diego should have a zoo, and he founded one.

Which bookkeeper, hired in 1925, rose to run San Diego Zoo until 1953 and became known as 'the Zoo Lady'?

Belle Benchley got the top job in 1927 because a string of directors had not lasted, among them animal collector Frank Buck, who fell out with the founder and was gone in three months.

Ken Allen, San Diego Zoo's 'Hairy Houdini', who kept escaping his enclosure in 1985, was what kind of ape?

Orangutan: Ken Allen walked out three times that summer to stroll past the other animals, and keepers who posed as tourists to learn his route got nowhere, because he would not be fooled.

Which New York dynasty gave its name to the Bronx Zoo fountain that once stood in a lakeside piazza in Como, Italy?

The Rockefellers: William Rockefeller bought the fountain from Como in 1902 for 3,500 lire, then about $637, and had it shipped across the Atlantic and set up at the zoo the next year.

Knut, the polar bear cub who caused 'Knutmania' in 2007, was born at which zoo?

Berlin Zoo: Knut was born there in December 2006, abandoned on a rock by his mother Tosca and raised by a keeper, the first polar bear cub to survive infancy at the zoo in over thirty years.

Knut, the hand-reared polar bear cub of 2007, shared the cover of which magazine's 'Green Issue' with Leonardo DiCaprio?

Vanity Fair: Annie Leibovitz photographed the cub, who was then set beside the actor in her cover picture, and his zoo trademarked his name and took in nearly five million extra euros that year.

Which Texas-born gorilla, shot in 2016 after a small boy fell into his zoo moat, became a worldwide internet meme?

Harambe was born at Gladys Porter Zoo in Brownsville and named after a Rita Marley song; keepers shot him to protect the three-year-old, and mock tributes to him flooded the internet for months.

The Zookeeper's Wife tells how a zoo director and his wife hid Jews from the Nazis at which city's zoo?

Warsaw: bombing had wrecked much of the zoo, so Jan and Antonina Żabiński hid people fleeing the ghetto in the empty cages and in their own villa, and the zoo now carries their names.

By 1987 every wild member of which giant bird had been caught for a last-ditch zoo breeding programme?

California condor: only 22 were left in 1982, so every wild bird was taken in to breed at zoos in San Diego and Los Angeles, and their descendants now fly free again over three states.

'Me at the zoo', filmed at San Diego Zoo's elephant enclosure in 2005, was the first video uploaded to which website?

YouTube: co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded the 19-second clip in April 2005, and all he has to say in it is that the cool thing about elephants is their really long trunks.

Jumbo the elephant was sold in 1882 to which American showman despite public protest?

P. T. Barnum paid London Zoo £2,000 for Jumbo while schoolchildren wrote to Queen Victoria begging her to stop the sale, and the elephant's fame made 'jumbo' an everyday word for huge.

At which Paris zoo was the young elephant Jumbo kept before he was moved to London in 1865?

Jardin des Plantes: its menagerie sent Jumbo on to London, where he grew into the giant whose sale to an American circus caused a national outcry; a train killed him in Ontario in 1885.

Which New York zoo, begun in the 1860s as a park menagerie, is home to Alex the lion in the film Madagascar?

Central Park Zoo began by accident: New Yorkers kept leaving unwanted pets in the park, starting with a bear cub tied to a tree in 1859, until the city gave the collection a proper home.

Sudan, who spent 34 years at a Czech zoo and died in Kenya in 2018, was the last male of which animal?

Northern white rhino: Sudan came from Dvůr Králové, the only zoo where his kind ever bred, and when he died the whole subspecies was down to two females.

Besides animals, the founder of Tierpark Hagenbeck pioneered which now-notorious form of exhibition?

Human zoos, or Völkerschauen: from 1874 Hagenbeck toured Sámi families, then Nubians and Inuit, in staged 'native' settings beside his animals, a format other showmen copied and that is now condemned.

What was the trade of Carl Hagenbeck's father, who gave his teenage son some seals and a polar bear to deal in?

A fishmonger: Claus Hagenbeck sold fish and showed exotic animals on the side, and the son he handed them to at 14 took over the sideline and became Europe's leading animal dealer.

Which Aztec emperor kept a 'house of animals' at Tenochtitlan so large that it needed hundreds of keepers?

Moctezuma II: his birds, mammals and reptiles amazed Cortés's men in 1519, but when the city rose against the Spaniards Cortés had the zoo destroyed in the fighting.

In 1907 the Bronx Zoo sent 15 animals by rail to Oklahoma to restart wild herds of which near-extinct species?

American bison: hunting had cut tens of millions to a few hundred, so zoo director William Hornaday led a society founded at the zoo in 1905 that bred them in New York and shipped them back to the plains.

The Regent's Park zoo received its 1829 royal charter from which king, the former Prince Regent?

George IV died the next year, and the royal menagerie at Windsor was handed to the young zoo, soon followed by the animals that had been kept at the Tower of London.

Under a deal struck in its early years, who legally owns every animal at the San Diego Zoo?

The city government: the young zoological society signed its animals and property over to the city in return for a home in Balboa Park, and has run the zoo on the city's behalf ever since.

Which striped marsupial's last known member died at a Hobart zoo in 1936?

Tasmanian tiger: the last known thylacine died at Hobart's zoo on 7 September 1936, and Australia now marks that date every year as National Threatened Species Day.

Which zoo bred Tohui, in 1981 the first giant panda born outside China to survive infancy?

Chapultepec Zoo, Mexico City, had lost its first panda cub at eight days old, crushed by accident by her mother, but Tohui, born the next year to the same pair, lived to raise a cub of her own.

Which desert antelope, extinct in the wild by the early 1970s, was saved by a 'world herd' bred at Phoenix Zoo?

Arabian oryx: Operation Oryx gathered some of the last animals in Arizona, their descendants went back to the desert from 1980, and in 2011 the species became the first to climb from extinct in the wild to vulnerable.

Sydney's Taronga Zoo takes its name from an Aboriginal word usually translated as what?

'Beautiful view' suits the site: the zoo moved in 1916 from a cramped park in the city to a hillside on the north shore, looking back across Sydney Harbour.

Covering 287 hectares (710 acres), which is the largest zoo in Canada?

Toronto Zoo opened in 1974 to replace the cramped Victorian Riverdale Zoo, jumping from 3 hectares to 287, and the old downtown site became a city farm.

The world's first nocturnal zoo, the Night Safari, opened in 1994 in which country?

Singapore: the Night Safari opened beside Singapore Zoo in 1994 as an open-air park that runs only after dark under lighting that mimics moonlight, rather than reversing animals' cycles indoors.

Who bought Oakfield Manor for £3,500 in 1930 and opened Chester Zoo in its grounds?

George Mottershead, wounded in the First World War and told he would never walk again, bought Oakfield in 1930 and opened Chester Zoo there in June 1931, a bar-free zoo from the start.

Zoo Atlanta began in 1889 when businessman George V. Gress donated what to the city?

Animals from a bankrupt circus: Gress bought the failed show in 1889 and gave its lions, hyena and monkeys to Atlanta, which housed them in Grant Park, where the zoo still stands.

Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo pioneered which exhibit style in the 1970s with a gorilla forest that seemed to include the visitors?

Landscape immersion: designer David Hancocks ran the same trees, rocks and planting on past the barrier, so people felt they stood in the apes' forest, and accredited zoos everywhere copied it.

The Dutch zoo Artis is named from the Latin motto Natura Artis Magistra, meaning what?

'Nature is the teacher of art': the three Latin words stand one each over the zoo's three gates, and Amsterdammers know the place simply by the word on the middle one.

Dublin Zoo, opened 1831, won over poorer visitors by cutting Sunday admission to what?

One penny: cheap Sundays set Dublin Zoo apart from other zoos of its day, and its first animals were gifts from London Zoo and the royal menagerie at the Tower of London.

Slats, a lion born at Dublin Zoo in 1919, became the first 'Leo' for which studio?

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer put Slats on its films from 1924 to 1928, and he is the only one of the studio's lions who never roars: he just looks around.

In 1943 Tokyo's Ueno Zoo was ordered to kill its dangerous animals on what stated grounds?

Fear of air-raid escapes was the official reason: Tokyo's governor said bombs could loose the animals into the streets, keepers' pleas to evacuate them were refused, and a memorial service followed that September.

Which naturalist, born in India and raised partly on Corfu, founded Jersey Zoo in 1959?

Gerald Durrell had caught animals for other zoos and wanted one that would save species, not just show them, so he paid for it with the earnings from books such as My Family and Other Animals.

Which zoo euthanised healthy giraffe Marius in 2014 and fed him to its lions in public?

Copenhagen Zoo shot Marius in February 2014 because his genes were already common among Europe's zoo giraffes, then cut him up before a crowd that included children; its director got death threats.

'Jungle Jack' Hanna, a fixture on Letterman, became director of which zoo in 1978?

Columbus Zoo: Hanna's live animal spots on Good Morning America and late-night talk shows brought it national attention, and he stayed on as its public face long after handing over the director's job.

Colo, the first gorilla born in captivity, was named by blending her birth city with which US state?

Ohio: Colo is short for Columbus, Ohio, where she was born in 1956; rejected by her mother, she was raised by keepers in baby clothes and lived to 60, the oldest gorilla then known.

Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo began in 1868 with a gift from New York's Central Park of what?

Two pairs of swans, sent by Central Park's commissioners, started the collection; the first animal the zoo paid for, a bear cub, kept getting out to roam the park at night.

Which institution built the Saint Louis Zoo's 1904 Flight Cage for that year's World's Fair?

The Smithsonian Institution built the walk-through aviary for the 1904 World's Fair; St. Louis bought it rather than see it taken apart and sent back to Washington, and the zoo grew up around it.

Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, billed as America's only mountain zoo, sits on a slope above which city?

Colorado Springs: hotelier Spencer Penrose was given a bear in 1916 and kept adding animals at his Broadmoor resort until a monkey bit a guest, so the collection moved up the mountain.

Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo houses its indoor desert in the world's largest glazed what?

A geodesic dome: the 2002 Desert Dome is the world's largest glazed one, with the Kingdoms of the Night nocturnal exhibit beneath it and the Lied Jungle indoor rainforest nearby.

Brookfield Zoo near Chicago won fame on opening in 1934 for using what instead of cages?

Moats and ditches made Brookfield famous from its first day, and three years later the crowds came for Su Lin, the first giant panda in an American zoo, carried across the Pacific as a bottle-fed cub.

Which Brookfield Zoo gorilla cradled a small boy who fell into her enclosure in 1996?

Binti Jua cradled the unconscious three-year-old and laid him down by the door when she heard keepers open it, with her own 17-month-old daughter clinging to her back throughout.

'Crocodile Hunter' Steve Irwin died in 2006 from an injury caused by which animal, while filming on the Great Barrier Reef?

Stingray: Irwin was at Batt Reef filming a series called Ocean's Deadliest when a ray's barb struck him in the chest, and he was dead before an emergency crew reached his boat.

Which zoo began in 1970 as a two-acre reptile park at Beerwah, Queensland, run by Steve Irwin's parents?

Australia Zoo took that name only in 1998, after Steve and Terri Irwin had taken over from his parents and money from The Crocodile Hunter was paying for new land and exhibits.

Which Swiss city on the Rhine has the country's oldest zoo, opened in 1874 and known to locals as the 'Zolli'?

Basel: the zoo began the captive breeding of the Somali wild ass, and every one of those rare wild donkeys now living in a zoo anywhere is related to its herd.

The Paris menagerie founded in 1794 was stocked largely from which royal residence's zoo?

Versailles: the Revolution dissolved the royal menagerie there, and its surviving animals were carted to the capital to stock a zoo run by the new natural history museum instead of the court.

A 'frozen zoo' stores sperm, eggs and tissue from endangered species in tanks of what?

Liquid nitrogen at about −196 °C: the original Frozen Zoo, started at San Diego by pathologist Kurt Benirschke in the 1970s, banked samples before any technology existed to use them.

Martha, who died at Cincinnati Zoo on 1 September 1914, was the last known of which bird?

Passenger pigeon: Martha, named after Martha Washington, died alone in her Cincinnati cage, the last of a species that had once filled American skies in flocks billions strong.

Cincinnati Zoo's premature hippo Fiona, born in 2017, was named because her ears recalled a character in which film?

Shrek: her ears reminded keepers of Princess Fiona's; born six weeks early at 29 pounds, about half the lowest hippo birth weight on record, she pulled through with help from a children's hospital team.

In return for pandas Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing in 1972, the US sent China a pair of what?

Musk oxen went to Beijing in return: Pat Nixon had told Zhou Enlai over dinner how fond she was of pandas, he promised her some, and the pair drew millions of visitors to Washington.

Washington's 2005 panda cub Tai Shan was popularly nicknamed what before he was named?

Butterstick: the newborn was about the size of a stick of butter, bloggers ran with the nickname, and it stuck even though the zoo's naming poll offered only five traditional Chinese names.

The real Smokey Bear, a cub rescued from a New Mexico wildfire in 1950, spent the rest of his life where?

Smithsonian's National Zoo was his home for 26 years, and so many letters arrived addressed to him that the postal service gave the bear a ZIP code of his own.

What is the 145-foot sculpted tree, carved with hundreds of animals, that stands as the icon of Disney's Animal Kingdom called?

Tree of Life: more than 300 animals are carved into its trunk and roots, and one was a late addition, a chimpanzee put in at the insistence of Jane Goodall when she visited.

What kind of tortoise was Adwaita, said to be from the Seychelles, who died in a Kolkata zoo at a claimed 255?

Aldabra giant: keepers said Adwaita had been one of four tortoises given to Clive of India in the 1750s, a tale nobody has proved, so his shell was kept for carbon dating when he died in 2006.

Harriet, a giant tortoise who died in Queensland in 2006 aged about 175, was reputedly collected by whom?

Charles Darwin, supposedly, on the Beagle's 1835 visit; but Harriet's kind lives only on an island he never landed on, and for many years she was taken for a male called Harry.

Which Mbuti man was put on show in the Bronx Zoo's Monkey House in 1906?

Ota Benga was shown among the apes from September 1906; Black clergymen led by James H. Gordon protested at once, and within weeks he had left the zoo for the orphanage Gordon ran.

Zoo Atlanta's gorilla Willie B. spent 27 years alone in a cage with a tire swing and what?

A television: Willie B. watched TV in his indoor cage from 1961 until 1988, when Zoo Atlanta's new rainforest habitat let him outdoors to lead a troop; he was named for Mayor William B. Hartsfield.

What do zookeepers call working with elephants or big cats only through a barrier, never sharing the animal's space?

Protected contact: the animal can walk away whenever it likes, and nobody needs the hooked goad that the older hands-on way of handling elephants, called free contact, relies on.

Obaysch, who doubled London Zoo's visitor numbers in 1850, was the first of which animal seen in Europe since Roman times?

Hippopotamus: an Ottoman viceroy swapped the Nile-caught calf for some greyhounds and deerhounds, and London went wild for him, with up to 10,000 visitors a day and even a Hippopotamus Polka.

Which estate opened the first drive-through safari park outside Africa in 1966?

Longleat: the idea came from circus man Jimmy Chipperfield, who set lions loose in the Marquess of Bath's Wiltshire park and five years later did the same for the Earl of Derby near Liverpool.

Knowsley Safari near Liverpool built a bypass so drivers can avoid which animals?

Baboons: Knowsley's troop swarms over cars and was filmed working out how to open roof boxes, so the park gives nervous drivers a road around the enclosure.

Which is Australia's oldest zoo, opened in Royal Park on land given by the city in 1862?

Melbourne Zoo began as a halfway house where imported farm animals got over the long voyage to Australia; exotic animals for the public to look at came only after 1870.

Cairo's Giza Zoo, opened in 1891, has a suspension footbridge credited to which French engineer?

Gustave Eiffel is credited with the bridge, built so that visitors could look down on the animals from above; it may have been the first raised viewing walkway at any zoo.

Chi Chi, the Regent's Park zoo's 1960s star panda, inspired Peter Scott's logo for what?

World Wildlife Fund: Peter Scott drew its 1961 panda logo from Chi Chi, who had reached London only because the US embargo on Chinese goods barred her from an American zoo; she is now stuffed in the Natural History Museum.

London Zoo's famous gorilla Guy got his name by arriving in 1947 on which British celebration?

Bonfire Night is also Guy Fawkes Night, hence the name; he arrived as a baby clutching a tin hot-water bottle and, for all his fearsome looks, would gently cup small birds that flew into his cage.

Which storybook character was named after a Canadian black bear that a soldier left at London Zoo in 1914?

Winnie-the-Pooh: army vet Harry Colebourn bought the cub for $20 at an Ontario railway stop and called her Winnipeg after his home city, and A. A. Milne's son renamed his teddy after her.

Gus, a New York zoo's obsessively swimming polar bear, was the first zoo animal put on what?

Prozac: Gus swam figure-eights for hours on end, the zoo brought in an animal therapist to find out why, and reporters turned the neurotic bear into a symbol of stressed-out New York.

Feral hippos in Colombia's Magdalena River region descend from whose private zoo?

Pablo Escobar smuggled four hippos into his estate's private zoo with elephants and giraffes; after his fall the other animals went to zoos, but the hippos were too hard to move and bred in the wild.

Which Jersey Zoo silverback, whose name is Swahili for 'hello', stood guard over a boy who fell into his enclosure in 1986?

Jambo's gentleness, caught on a visitor's home video as he stroked the unconscious five-year-old's back, was shown around the world and eased public fears that gorillas were violent.

Edinburgh Zoo was the first zoo in the world to house and breed which birds?

Penguins: the first came off a whaling ship that docked at Leith, the zoo hatched the first chick ever bred in captivity, and its daily penguin parade began by accident when some birds got out.

Edinburgh Zoo's Sir Nils Olav, knighted in 2008, is mascot of which nation's King's Guard?

Norway: its King's Guard adopted the zoo's bird as a mascot in 1972 while in the city for the Military Tattoo, and every return visit has brought a promotion, the name and rank passing to each successor.

Which future king, touring India as Prince of Wales in 1875 and 1876, opened Kolkata's Alipore zoo?

Edward VII, Queen Victoria's heir, opened it on an eight-month tour of India; the collection had grown out of a private menagerie that a governor-general kept at his summer house outside the city.

Loro Parque, whose parrot collection is billed as the world's largest, is on which Canary Island?

Tenerife: the name is Spanish for 'parrot park', and the foundation it set up in 1994 breeds threatened parrots and pays for projects to protect them in the wild.

Which zoo is billed as the only tropical zoo in the continental United States?

Zoo Miami goes back to 1948, when a road show stranded nearby paid for its truck repairs with three monkeys, a goat and two bears, the first animals of a small zoo on Key Biscayne.

Hellabrunn, the first zoo laid out by geography rather than species, is in which city?

Munich: hyperinflation forced Hellabrunn to close in 1922, and when it reopened six years later its director, Heinz Heck, rearranged the animals by the part of the world they came from, the first 'Geo-Zoo'.

Honolulu Zoo is the only US zoo established by grants from what kind of figure?

A sovereign monarch: King Kalākaua gave Crown land for a public park named after his queen, Kapiʻolani, and the exotic birds he kept there were the start of the zoo.

Packy, born at the Oregon Zoo in 1962, was the first of which animal born in the Western Hemisphere in 44 years?

Asian elephant: a zoo birth was then so rare that the world's press came to Portland, Life magazine ran a long picture story, and a radio contest gave the calf his name.

Which English monarch's polar bear, a gift in 1252, lived at the Tower of London and fished in the Thames?

Henry III: the bear came from King Haakon IV, and London's sheriffs were told to pay fourpence a day for its keep while it fished in the river on the end of a chain.

Which emperor's menagerie gained an elephant named Abul-Abbas in 802, a gift from the caliph Harun al-Rashid?

Charlemagne had asked the caliph for an elephant; his envoy Isaac landed it in Italy in 801, waited out the winter because snow had closed the Alps, and delivered it to him at Aachen the next summer.

Zoo breeding programmes record every animal's parentage in a registry called what?

A studbook: each breeding programme keeps one for its species, and the family trees in it guide the pairings and transfers that keep a zoo population genetically diverse.