Zoos—everyone knows what they are; they are loved by all ages, from adolescents to the elderly, and over 181 million people visit them every year. They are the core memories in a child’s life. Barely three sentences in, and you are probably thinking about a memory there, albeit recently or in the past, as the world is slowly forming into a more modern place. The zoo is the closest thing to an escape from the concrete jungle, showing species of animals that aren’t native to your area and giving you an extra level of connection to your world. But the question that stands is: how? How did origins come to be, and did it have any significance other than to be an attraction for customers?
Well, to start Zoo is short for zoology, which is from the Greek words zoon, translated to ‘animal’, and logia, ‘the study of’. The idea of zoos has been here for generations of years: to keep a collection of animals, often to show levels of wealth and status, a menagerie that has been evident and recorded by the Egyptians and Mesopotamians as wall carvings. Dating back to the BCE, people have kept collections of animals. Translate to Greek, Roman, etc. You may not have known it, but George Washington himself had a private managerie (zoo) on his estate. Fast forward to the 18th century; everyone knows this was the time when innovations and ideas for building blocks were being made. One of the studies was on animals and how they live. And to do this, they made them live nearby in rooms that aligned with their climate and area to accurately know what they could about the desired animal. In 1793, the first “Zoo” was open to kings and queens as well as aristocrats, until it eventually snowballed into what it is today. Offering different types of zoos, the most common being sanctuaries for endangered animals and aquariums. Thank you for listening to my short, and I hope you learned something.
