Speaker 1: Zus No four animals, famous for getting to visit the
Speaker 1: animals at the zoo. Nobody thinks much about them, So
Speaker 1: let's have some fun. Let's find out why sus are
Speaker 1: secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey, they're folks, Welcome to a whole
Speaker 1: new podcast episode of podcasts all about why being alive
Speaker 1: is more interesting than people think it is. My name
Speaker 1: is Alex Schmidt, and folks, not only am I not alone,
Speaker 1: I'm joined by my co host, Katie Golden.
Speaker 2: Katie, Alex, Hey, good to.
Speaker 1: See you boy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's good to see it too.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you're back from your break.
Speaker 3: Me too.
Speaker 1: And I am also so glad people picked such a
Speaker 1: wonderful topic friend episode. Thank you to Koop Bear with
Speaker 1: support from lots of folks. Katie, what's your relationship to
Speaker 1: or opinion of zoos. You don't think about animals, You
Speaker 1: probably haven't heard of them or anything.
Speaker 3: I grew up in San Diego, so I went to
Speaker 3: one of the world's most famous zoos quite a bit
Speaker 3: when I was growing up as an adult, the San
Speaker 3: Diego Zoo. Yeah, and I also because I host a
Speaker 3: animal podcast, a creature feature, I get asked a lot
Speaker 3: what my opinion is on zoos. It really comes down
Speaker 3: to the zoos because some zoos are basically animal prisons.
Speaker 3: They're not very good. They don't have adequate space for animals,
Speaker 3: and so a lot of like roadside zoos are terrible.
Speaker 3: You just can't like put a wild animal in a
Speaker 3: small cage and call it a day, and I don't
Speaker 3: see any value to that. Zoos like the San Diego
Speaker 3: Zoo and other zoos, there are plenty all across the
Speaker 3: US and the world that do have adequate housing and
Speaker 3: care for their animals. I think are actually really important.
Speaker 3: They both do a lot of things like practically in
Speaker 3: terms of conservation and also in terms of education for
Speaker 3: the public. So I'm very much pro good zoo. I
Speaker 3: think there are a few animals that just can never
Speaker 3: realistically be kept in a zoo. One of them is elephants.
Speaker 3: They're just too big and they're too smart, and their
Speaker 3: whole life is nomadic. It's not ideal to have elephants
Speaker 3: at a zoo. I know some zoos have elephants because
Speaker 3: they're rescued, and I understand that, and I think that's fine,
Speaker 3: But I don't think elephants should ever be bred in
Speaker 3: a zoo. You don't find them much in zoos, But
Speaker 3: another one is Orca's. It's the same situations situation as Wales.
Speaker 3: They're too big, they're too intelligent in their lives revolved
Speaker 3: too much around nomadic lifestyle that a zoo cannot provide.
Speaker 3: They're highly social. Yeah, I don't know if any zoo
Speaker 3: that has orc is. I know that like Sea World
Speaker 3: of course infamously had them. So anyways, I would be against, say,
Speaker 3: breeding them and trying purposefully to keep them bred in
Speaker 3: a zoo. There are some animals that it's good they
Speaker 3: breed in zoo's, like pandas, because they really need the help.
Speaker 1: Oh those goofy little giant fuzzballs a.
Speaker 3: Bunch of voluntary seliments.
Speaker 1: I feel like this topic is really aimed for both
Speaker 1: of us, because, Yeah, you make your wonderful podcast creature
Speaker 1: feature you grew up near what it turns out is
Speaker 1: the most visited and as I understand it, by acclaim
Speaker 1: top zuo in the US San Diego Zoo, and then
Speaker 1: I've talked about being a zoo tour guide at Brookfield
Speaker 1: Zoo and near it's Brookfield, Illinois, it's near Chicago. I'm
Speaker 1: pretty in the tank for zoos. I'm pretty biased towards zoos.
Speaker 1: And I also I was saying this some by in
Speaker 1: discord too, like when people say it's sort of like
Speaker 1: an animal jail, they're right, it's just I think it's
Speaker 1: worth it. So yeah, it's my like they are stuck
Speaker 1: and it's hard to rewild most of them. And then
Speaker 1: also I think it's worthwhile overall, but it's like.
Speaker 3: A Nordic animal jail for good zoos. I'm not a
Speaker 3: US carceral system.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like my grammishment would get us
Speaker 1: a Brookfield Zoo membership every Christmas for the family, and
Speaker 1: then my mom would take me and my brother there
Speaker 1: so we run around and wear ourselves out. Then I
Speaker 1: dreamed of being a tour guide. Then it was a
Speaker 1: tour guide. Me and my wife have gone to a
Speaker 1: zoo most every Thanksgiving our whole relationship. Like zoos, I
Speaker 1: have like too many zoo associations, and we'll just get
Speaker 1: into it, I think as we go. I love them.
Speaker 3: I've never been to the Brookfield Zoo, but I have
Speaker 3: seen sort of like the general layout all of this stuff.
Speaker 1: It looks like a.
Speaker 3: Good zoo to me. It seems like they have all
Speaker 3: the stuff, like really just there are some zoos that
Speaker 3: are just like, here's a cage with a tiger in it,
Speaker 3: and it's like, yeah, that's that's no, that's no good.
Speaker 3: But when a zoo really tries and cares about the
Speaker 3: animals and cares about their welfare, maybe it's not always ideal,
Speaker 3: but I don't I don't think it's cruel.
Speaker 1: Thank you again, folks for picking this. I'm sorry scited
Speaker 1: to talk about it. On every episode we lead with
Speaker 1: a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics in a
Speaker 1: segment called Alexeyora stats Man, alexeyorastats Man, Katie yourra stats man,
Speaker 1: Do dude, do you keep all your numbers in a
Speaker 1: big brown stats inside a zoo? What a stats to do?
Speaker 3: I like how the take on the lyrics to that
Speaker 3: song make just about as much sense as the original.
Speaker 3: Like the original never made any sense to me. This one,
Speaker 3: in a way is even more clear, uh than the
Speaker 3: original Beatles song.
Speaker 1: Almost everything on Magical Mystery tours that way. It's great. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is baby, You're a rich man. And thank you
Speaker 1: Paul Zorin for that suggestion related to the topic. Thank you, Paul.
Speaker 1: We have a new name for this every week. Please
Speaker 1: make a mis Silli and waggon bass possible, submit your
Speaker 1: discord or to sift Pot at gmail dot com. And
Speaker 1: the first number of this week is more than eight thousand,
Speaker 1: six hundred species.
Speaker 3: Oh, that is.
Speaker 1: The number of different animal species in zoos and Aquariums
Speaker 1: accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which is
Speaker 1: mostly a US organization.
Speaker 3: And it's wild because that's a lot wild.
Speaker 1: Yes, it comes back from her summer break thinks I
Speaker 1: won't pick out the word wild.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well I thought naively I could just get away
Speaker 3: with that. But yeah, that's like a tiny fraction of
Speaker 3: the world's species. I would have a lot of. That
Speaker 3: is because a lot of zoos do have huge insect exhibits,
Speaker 3: which are actually one of my favorite parts of zoos,
Speaker 3: the bug house. They're so good, and insects alone are
Speaker 3: there's so many species of animals. That's like a tiny fraction,
Speaker 3: and that's still a ton of species. That's really impressive.
Speaker 1: It is truly, because this is basically just the US
Speaker 1: almost the AZA. The Association of Zoos and Aquariums is
Speaker 1: an umbrella organization. It was founded in nineteen twenty four,
Speaker 1: and it's not part of the government, it's not required
Speaker 1: by any laws. It's just helping two hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: one zoos and aquariums in thirteen countries run well on
Speaker 1: like a set of voluntary good standards that includes zoos
Speaker 1: in forty six US states and the District of Columbia.
Speaker 1: And then there's other versions of this organization in other countries.
Speaker 1: So if you're in what feels like a professional zoo,
Speaker 1: it's probably because of one of these umbrella organizations that
Speaker 1: nobody thinks about doing a bunch of good work.
Speaker 3: If there hasn't been like a cage with clearly what
Speaker 3: is a man who's naked painted to look like a
Speaker 3: tiger going rah, it's probably one of these accredited zoos.
Speaker 1: And if there is that, it's my one man show,
Speaker 1: Tiger Elix. It's off off off Broadway and go very
Speaker 1: far away. They wouldn't let me.
Speaker 3: I feel like I've probably described someone's fetish and I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: Oh no, I didn't mean it. I really took it
Speaker 1: there because I made it me. Uh yeah. And then
Speaker 1: the ACA also runs a lot of SSPs. SSPs are
Speaker 1: species survival plans. So that's a system of exchanging and
Speaker 1: breeding the members of more than five hundred endangered species
Speaker 1: in zoos, again just in their group. Then there's as
Speaker 1: MP's the Australasian Species Management Program, there's EEPs the European
Speaker 1: as a C two programs, there's a bunch of different
Speaker 1: umbrella groups. And then also basically logs of family trees
Speaker 1: and which animals are where to try to breed endangered
Speaker 1: species as well as possible. And again many many thousands
Speaker 1: of species are successfully kept in zoos, and also zoos
Speaker 1: are skipping a lot of animals that are doing fine
Speaker 1: without captivity and are high end numbers in the wild.
Speaker 1: So it's an impressive amount.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, it's I mean, this is kind of one
Speaker 3: of the great thing about zoos is that you do
Speaker 3: have a repertoire of the animal genome that is being
Speaker 3: cared for and protected. It's kind of like a seed bank,
Speaker 3: right for plants and stuff. But you can't just keep
Speaker 3: animals in suspended animations, so you got to take care
Speaker 3: of them, and it's a nice thing that the public
Speaker 3: then also gets to see them.
Speaker 1: A next quick number is seven hundred million people. Seven
Speaker 1: hundred million people is approximate global old attendance at zoos
Speaker 1: and also aquariums. Aquariums are basically just considered a specialized zoo,
Speaker 1: so zoo's aquariums, aviaries, everything else.
Speaker 3: How they get that water to stay behind those bars though.
Speaker 1: Alex, that's how they prevent the lion from drowning. It
Speaker 1: goes out of the bars and then.
Speaker 3: They keep throwing the fish back in. I love aquariums
Speaker 3: as well. Actually, my favorite aquarium is a smaller one
Speaker 3: in San Diego associated with UCSD, called the Birch Aquarium.
Speaker 3: It's does not have any large whales or dolphins or
Speaker 3: anything like that, just a bunch of really cool fish
Speaker 3: and a great view of the ocean and like an
Speaker 3: artificial tide pool outside that you can like go and
Speaker 3: interact with respectfully. They don't want you to grabbing and
Speaker 3: shaking the sea here, but it just it's always been
Speaker 3: my favorite aquarium. It's not that big, it's just really
Speaker 3: well maintained. Since my dad worked at scripts Instituto of Oceanography,
Speaker 3: I got to go like all the time. It was amazing.
Speaker 1: I'll bet we both grew up with just such good
Speaker 1: aquariums that see, world was never like a consideration, because
Speaker 1: Chicago has an excellent one called the Shad Aquarium right
Speaker 1: on the lake.
Speaker 3: What was your favorite part of the aquarium anytime?
Speaker 1: I wasn't feeling afraid various phobias, but also sincerely they
Speaker 1: had beluga whales. Wow, and they're like neat. And both
Speaker 1: Brookfield and the Shad had dolphins and those are cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was.
Speaker 1: I was kind of whiteknuckling the aquarium every time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, man, that was You want to know my favorite
Speaker 3: part of the aquarium, Alex, You're not gonna like this. Yeah,
Speaker 3: the jellyfish area.
Speaker 1: There was this uh it makes sense. Yeah, like if
Speaker 1: you like, there are really cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, You're in the dark and there's these giant tanks
Speaker 3: full of these ethereal otherworldly beings. They had a bunch
Speaker 3: of different Nigerians there, so they had like sea gooseberries
Speaker 3: that had this sort of like luminescence over their sides
Speaker 3: and stuff, and just like beautiful, beautiful surrounded by a
Speaker 3: jellyfish in the dark, which I assume is your worst nightmare,
Speaker 3: but for me, it was very soothing.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That's like the cut scene for when my character
Speaker 1: loses in Mortal Kombat or something. Right, like they're fatalitied
Speaker 1: by jellyfish ships it to jellyfish. Hell, this topic is
Speaker 1: so common in people's lives, Like it's not that everyone
Speaker 1: gets to go. But another number here is one hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty one million zoo visitors just in the US
Speaker 1: per year. And that's not unique visitors. But if it
Speaker 1: was unique visitors, that'd be more than half the US population.
Speaker 1: Probably more than a third of Americans go to a
Speaker 1: zoo aquarium every year. And despite some of those, except
Speaker 1: a few DC ones, being expensive, people still make it happen,
Speaker 1: like we just love zoos. The most visited US zoo
Speaker 1: is San Diego, the most visited European zoo is apparently Berlin.
Speaker 1: The most visited Asian zoo is in Singapore. And also
Speaker 1: the Guinness Book of World Records. They're never really a
Speaker 1: solid source of information, but for their records they allow
Speaker 1: a looser definition of zoos, so they say the world's
Speaker 1: most popular zoo is the Animal Kingdom section of Walt
Speaker 1: Disney World in Florida, which has like a zookeeping element
Speaker 1: and there's animals there. I really I didn't know that
Speaker 1: I've been once. There was like a pretty substantial collection
Speaker 1: of animals that's like not a ride or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and two next numbers to share kind of back to back.
Speaker 1: The two next numbers are twenty two California condors and
Speaker 1: only several hundred American bison. Those are the estimated low
Speaker 1: points of each of those animal populations, and they are
Speaker 1: at least two of the species that have objectively definitely
Speaker 1: been saved partly through zoo efforts.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, which is wild because like I'm gonna keep saying,
Speaker 3: and you have to calm down about it, because like
Speaker 3: it's it's not like as long as you have a
Speaker 3: male animal and a female animal, that population can be saved.
Speaker 3: Like it's freaking Noah's arc. Uh that it's usually too
Speaker 3: late by that point because the gen that's enough genes, right,
Speaker 3: it's too probably not enough. Like if if Noah's arc
Speaker 3: was real, like the genetic bottleneck would be so crazy. Yeah,
Speaker 3: what was God thinking? Come on, stupid?
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it's almost like it's a metaphor a parable
Speaker 1: or something.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah right now, couldn't be uh, but yeah, the
Speaker 3: the uh, you really do need a robust genetic population
Speaker 3: for most animals. Some animals can get surprisingly by because
Speaker 3: they have weird genetic shenanigans.
Speaker 1: Cough like jellyfish cough, monsters, the monsters.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like asexual reproduction. But it's an incredible feat to
Speaker 3: go from like, you know, a few dozen individuals to
Speaker 3: actually bringing the population back successfully. Like that's it's hard
Speaker 3: to understate how impressive that is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, especially with condors. It's such an amazing story of
Speaker 1: especially modern conservation. Apparently in the year nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 1: so not long ago. In nineteen eighty two, biologists estimated
Speaker 1: that there were only twenty two California condors left and
Speaker 1: began bringing as many into zoos as possible and then
Speaker 1: bred them, rewilded a bunch of them. There's now hundreds
Speaker 1: of them in the wild.
Speaker 3: They managed to avoid the problems with like a human
Speaker 3: raising a condor and having the condor and print on
Speaker 3: humans by making these amazing condor hand puppets that were
Speaker 3: very realistic that they used to feed these baby condors.
Speaker 3: Whooping cranes is another example. It's very funny with them
Speaker 3: because it's like people with the whooping crane hand puppet,
Speaker 3: but then they walk around with sort of a sheet
Speaker 3: over the rest of their bodies because they're like they're
Speaker 3: like feeding and trying to teach the young whooping cranes stuff,
Speaker 3: and so it's very it's very funny, but it's surprisingly effective, and.
Speaker 1: They did it. There's now hundreds of California condors in
Speaker 1: the wild. They of course still need support, but without
Speaker 1: the efforts of zoos specifically, that wouldn't have happened. And
Speaker 1: then much earlier in history, around the eighteen nineties, the
Speaker 1: estimate was only several hundred American bison, which was down
Speaker 1: from a peak of at least thirty million. Individuals and zoos.
Speaker 1: In particular, the Bronxio in New York, working with parks
Speaker 1: like wind Cave National Park in South Dakota, came together
Speaker 1: to bring back the and so now a lot of
Speaker 1: zoological associations in the US the logo might have a
Speaker 1: bisoner feature that and yeah, that's another zoo thing. They
Speaker 1: also might do a lot of their conservation effort off
Speaker 1: the property. My favorite number there because it's a Brookfield thing.
Speaker 1: The number is the year nineteen seventy. Back in nineteen seventy,
Speaker 1: Brookfield began a research programs studying Atlantic bottlenose dolphins in Florida,
Speaker 1: and according to the Chicago Tribune. It is the longest
Speaker 1: ongoing study of a wild marine mammal population in the
Speaker 1: history of science. They've since the seventies had an ongoing
Speaker 1: entire facility and team studying dolphins in Florida, even though
Speaker 1: if you're a zoo guest in Chicago, that doesn't entertain
Speaker 1: you other than maybe some signs about it, like a
Speaker 1: lot of zoos are doing not just behind the scenes,
Speaker 1: but thousands of miles away conservation efforts.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's it sounds very similar to museums as well.
Speaker 3: Like natural history museums, you're really only seeing a frack
Speaker 3: of their collection that's presented throughout the museum. There's so
Speaker 3: many other specimens behind the scenes and so much research
Speaker 3: that happens behind the scenes. It's equally interesting. But they
Speaker 3: just they simply can't just put a researcher on display
Speaker 3: going through an archive of thousands of birds. That just
Speaker 3: doesn't really work.
Speaker 1: Watch the researcher feeding at noon and then a caper
Speaker 1: breaks him subway.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, Like here's your sandwich. Turkey's a little dry.
Speaker 3: But like with the dolphin study, I'd be curious here because,
Speaker 3: like a lot of the seventies studies on dolphins were
Speaker 3: pretty wild, Like do dolphins like jazz? Can we teach
Speaker 3: a dolphins to talk? What happens if we stick a
Speaker 3: very attractive woman in a hotel room with a dolphin.
Speaker 3: None of those are huge exaggerations of real studies they
Speaker 3: did with dolphins.
Speaker 1: It'd be funny if the only longitude in the long
Speaker 1: term information was about with dolphins like disco and uh,
Speaker 1: what dolphins think of Jimmy Carter. You know, it's just
Speaker 1: very seventies stuff.
Speaker 3: It'd be really funny. Like we've found out that dolphins
Speaker 3: are all staunch Republicans.
Speaker 1: They never heard about Watergate never. Also, they like water,
Speaker 1: so you know, right, Therefore it actually another wonderful animal
Speaker 1: conservation thing in zoo's is, of course zoo babies. One
Speaker 1: exciting number there is November twenty twenty four, this past
Speaker 1: November when we're taping. That is when the Edinburgh Zoo
Speaker 1: in Scotland trash talked the cow Kiow Open Zoo in Chonburi, Thailand.
Speaker 1: Trash talked it because each of them had a baby
Speaker 1: pygmy hippo.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, oh my goodness.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And Edinburgh really came for the queen here because.
Speaker 3: Edinburgh who comes from mood Dang.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Edinburgh had a new baby pygmy hippo who they
Speaker 1: named Hagis, and they did a social come on, we
Speaker 1: did a social media post titled Moodang who Dang introducing Hagis.
Speaker 3: If you want your cute baby hippo to really catch on,
Speaker 3: might I suggest basically any other name except Hagis.
Speaker 1: I think I think they were doing the it's so
Speaker 1: Scottish and gross, it's cute, but I don't.
Speaker 3: I'm not sold on naming a baby hippo Hagis, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And I also assume Haggas is less popular than
Speaker 1: Mudang because I hadn't really heard of Hagas before looking
Speaker 1: this up, So I think Mudang won. But also the
Speaker 1: kaw kiow Zoo refused to fight. They just replied saying
Speaker 1: that both hippos are adorable, and Edinburgh replied with what
Speaker 1: they called a notesapp style apology of quote. We were
Speaker 1: wrong to pitt Haggis and Moudang against each other.
Speaker 3: I mean it's true, like, why why are we pitting
Speaker 3: these hippos against each other? Is Hagas a boy? Uh?
Speaker 1: Oh, it's a girl.
Speaker 3: It's a girl, you know, what this. It's twenty twenty five.
Speaker 3: We could still have Julia and Julia with these two hippos.
Speaker 1: Two houses alike Indignity. Scotland and Thailand even have land
Speaker 1: in the name, you know, very.
Speaker 3: Similar they do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this was a rare case of anybody creating any
Speaker 1: conflict around zoo babies. Usually just the world is thrilled
Speaker 1: with them, one after another. Because of all the things
Speaker 1: about social media that are good, the best one might
Speaker 1: be easier access to zoo babies. It's great. Yes, one
Speaker 1: leader in that was a different hippospecies. In twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: a Nile hippo at the Cincinnati Zoo gave birth to
Speaker 1: a baby six weeks prematurely, and the world happily followed
Speaker 1: the successful work to get that premi hippo through her
Speaker 1: first month and then also enjoyed her activities. Her name
Speaker 1: is Fiona. This hippo i've heard of, Fiona is pretty
Speaker 1: world famous at the Cincinnati Zoo.
Speaker 3: Baby animals are mostly universally cute. Some of them come
Speaker 3: out looking heinously ugly, especially bird babies, but I still
Speaker 3: there's something about how ugly they are that is also
Speaker 3: cute to me. So I love pretty much any baby animal.
Speaker 1: One prime example of the funny lookingness becoming cute was
Speaker 1: a baby penguin recently named Pesto, who was enormous and
Speaker 1: had funky feathers.
Speaker 3: I'm aware of Pesto. I've been following Pesto huge.
Speaker 1: So there's a zoo baby for everybody. Go look up
Speaker 1: your favorites. It's great. It's just just a joy. I
Speaker 1: also want to shout out zoo moms. It's a less
Speaker 1: i think, celebrated element, but there are a bunch of
Speaker 1: exciting famous zoo moms all over the world. And one
Speaker 1: of the first famous ones the year is nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: because in nineteen ninety six, a Western Lowland gorilla named
Speaker 1: Binti Jua saved the life of a three year old human.
Speaker 1: This is one of the Brickfield Zoo stories that was
Speaker 1: also world news. They have a gorilla enclosure at their
Speaker 1: Tropic World exhibit where guests are pretty far above the animals,
Speaker 1: and so a three year old boy fell into it
Speaker 1: and was knocked unconscious. Binti Jewah physically shielded him from
Speaker 1: any other gorillas until keepers rescued him. And she also
Speaker 1: did that while her seventeen month old gorilla baby was
Speaker 1: on her back, and so it was like a thrilling
Speaker 1: animal motherhood and also protecting a human story for the world.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's amazing. And to be clear, like the other
Speaker 3: gorillas might not have done anything to the toddler because
Speaker 3: they were probably really curious, but she probably had some
Speaker 3: instinct of like, no, no, this is very delicate, like
Speaker 3: because their curiosity could you know, really severely hurt or
Speaker 3: even kill a human child. And yeah, it's just delicate,
Speaker 3: pretty incredible that not only is there that capacity for
Speaker 3: empathy an understanding of the situation, but just the variability
Speaker 3: and responses. Right, Like you have these some girls really excited,
Speaker 3: maybe they want to play in a way that might
Speaker 3: be harmful in this other girl who has maybe the
Speaker 3: the awareness or the personality where she understands to keep
Speaker 3: the other ones away. It just shows a really remarkable
Speaker 3: type of intelligence.
Speaker 1: And yah, we see it in a bunch of different
Speaker 1: ways too, in a bunch of other animal species with
Speaker 1: their own babies in zoos. And two amazing stories of
Speaker 1: that are from this partial year twenty twenty five. One
Speaker 1: is that in April twenty twenty five, there was a
Speaker 1: five point two magnitude earthquake that shook the San Diego
Speaker 1: Zoo Safari Park and the African elephants. The five adults
Speaker 1: in the enclosure hurried to form a protective circle. Their
Speaker 1: young got in the middle, and I think that was
Speaker 1: a known behavior, but people were excited to have footage
Speaker 1: of it and in that cool way.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Different story here is from the Philadelphia Zoo in February
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five. The two oldest residents of the Philadelphia
Speaker 1: Zoo are Galapagos tortoises, a male named Abraso and a
Speaker 1: female named Mommy. And ironically Mommy was not a mom
Speaker 1: yet until twenty twenty five. She laid sixteen eggs, resulting
Speaker 1: in four baby Galapagos tortoises, and she did that at
Speaker 1: the approximate age of one hundred. Wow, first time mom
Speaker 1: at one hundred.
Speaker 3: They live such a long time, and then the fact
Speaker 3: that their fecundity doesn't really go down that much with
Speaker 3: age is yeah bonkers.
Speaker 1: Yeah truly. Yeah, And the Smithsonian magazine article says they
Speaker 1: usually lived around two hundred, so this is definitely like
Speaker 1: middle age and a normal breeding age of one hundred.
Speaker 1: And also those tortoises have been in the care of
Speaker 1: the Philadelphia's youth since the early nineteen thirties. Wow, so
Speaker 1: many generations of human zoo keepers made those babies happen.
Speaker 1: It's cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I wonder what did it that? Like, Like why
Speaker 3: this was the year like you know, finally warmed up
Speaker 3: enough to It's like, you know, after like one hundred
Speaker 3: years together, I think I can tolerate you enough to
Speaker 3: have a baby. It is.
Speaker 1: They're almost like nts or something from Lord of the Rings,
Speaker 1: Like the decision making process is very NT moot for
Speaker 1: tourtots babies.
Speaker 3: I think, Yeah, it takes them a week to decide
Speaker 3: what they want for dinner, and.
Speaker 1: It's leaves, it leaves again, and it always leaves. And
Speaker 1: our last number before takeaways. It's the year two thousand
Speaker 1: and ninety four BC, so more than four thousand years
Speaker 1: ago twenty ninety four BC. That's the oldest record of
Speaker 1: a ruler like acquiring animals for a private zoo and
Speaker 1: essentially the oldest record of zoo keeping in human history
Speaker 1: that we found.
Speaker 3: So where was this?
Speaker 1: And it was a guy named the Great King Shulgia,
Speaker 1: who was the ruler of a Sumerian Empire in ancient Mesopotamia.
Speaker 1: He was mostly in the city of Or.
Speaker 3: It's really hard for me to respect a king whose
Speaker 3: name is Shulgia. I don't know why it doesn't. It
Speaker 3: doesn't inspire fear awe, it's just kind of a cute name,
Speaker 3: like here comes old King Shulgia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm completely with you. I was not into it
Speaker 1: when I read it. I was like, Okay, I guess
Speaker 1: he added great to the title of King Jesu that.
Speaker 1: One key source this week is the book The Modern Arc,
Speaker 1: The Story of Zoo's Past press in Future. That's by
Speaker 1: author and NPR journalist Vicki Crok. She says that we
Speaker 1: think exotic animal collecting started around five thousand years ago
Speaker 1: because we had the conditions of large cities and centralized
Speaker 1: governments and wealthy rulers who would assemble that for their
Speaker 1: own personal enjoyment. No, like, we think just various civilizations
Speaker 1: around the world could do that around five thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: and the oldest record of it is clay tablets saying
Speaker 1: that shulgiev Or purchased lions and maybe some other species
Speaker 1: for his private collection. So we also think lions are
Speaker 1: one of the first sioux animals in history.
Speaker 3: I mean, lions seemed to have throughout history this sort
Speaker 3: of universal awe inspiring effect on people. Yeah, and like
Speaker 3: to the point where people would try to be drawing
Speaker 3: them in medieval times in the Middle Ages without having
Speaker 3: ever seen one, just making these terrible, terrible drawings of
Speaker 3: weird dog looking things.
Speaker 1: And then also before the Colombian Exchange in Europe Asia Africa,
Speaker 1: apparently one of the other top zoo animals was giraffes.
Speaker 1: And there's a few thousand years of rulers really trying
Speaker 1: to get a giraffe. And it started with fourteen ninety
Speaker 1: BC the Egyptian pharaoh Queen hat ship sits. This pharaoh queen,
Speaker 1: she arranged the first recorded expedition to specifically collect animals
Speaker 1: for a private zoo, and we think she brought the
Speaker 1: first giraffe to Egypt. And then like jumping, a few
Speaker 1: thousand years later, various European countries recorded their first giraffe
Speaker 1: to come into their zoo and like massive crowds and
Speaker 1: public spectacle about it.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think that's remained the same, right, Giraffes
Speaker 3: and lions are probably some of the most popular animals.
Speaker 3: Yeah for a zoo, Like when you look at you
Speaker 3: look at zoo brochures and things like you're usually seeing
Speaker 3: like a tiraffe or a lion on there. If the
Speaker 3: zoo has giraffes or lions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the heights and everything, and yeah, it's just great.
Speaker 1: And yeah, so they were spread, you know, the Egyptians,
Speaker 1: the Romans, everybody was trying to get giraffes to look
Speaker 1: at if they didn't live near them. And we think
Speaker 1: pretty much worldwide, Jao Dynasty China and the Triple Alliance Aztecs,
Speaker 1: many different rulers were just the only people making zoos.
Speaker 1: And another source this week is a book called Zoo,
Speaker 1: a History of Zoological Gardens in the West. It's co
Speaker 1: written by Eric Brete and Elizabeth Hartwantfouget, who are professors
Speaker 1: at a university in Leone, France, and they say that
Speaker 1: there's a weird couple thousand years of not just royal
Speaker 1: private zoos in various places, but also they would really
Speaker 1: rise and fall with the personal interest in animals of
Speaker 1: each ruler, right, Like, it's not like the zoo that
Speaker 1: your city always has. It's a situation where either a
Speaker 1: ruler would inherit a huge zoo and just not be
Speaker 1: that big of an animal person and let a lot
Speaker 1: of them go, or not inherit a zoo and build
Speaker 1: a zoo real fast.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, you're just at that, You're at the
Speaker 3: mercy of the whims of your ruler. Maybe you have
Speaker 3: a ruler who's like super into u gi O cards
Speaker 3: and it's like, no more zoo, We're all into yu
Speaker 3: gi o cards now.
Speaker 1: And then their kids, like my dad liked yu gi oh,
Speaker 1: I like drafts, and then they get a bunch of drafts,
Speaker 1: and then you trade drafts for yugio the next generation.
Speaker 1: It's just a cycle, right, you know, draft yu gi oh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And you as the even as the land of gentry,
Speaker 3: just kind of have to sit back and let the
Speaker 3: whims of the ruler take precedent.
Speaker 1: Oh, there's been a regime change. Put our ugyo stuff away,
Speaker 1: get the draft out. We gotta it's it's it flips
Speaker 1: the fat flips man.
Speaker 3: Just get the dust off the get the giraffe out
Speaker 3: of the closet, dusted off.
Speaker 1: And yeah, and Barrettsay and Ardwan Fugier, they say that
Speaker 1: maybe the most amazing example of this royal fad switching
Speaker 1: is the last three major French kings, Louis the fourteenth, fifteenth,
Speaker 1: and sixteenth. Because they reigned for nearly one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty years put together, they each had a very long,
Speaker 1: many decades reign. Louis the sixteenth was killed by the
Speaker 1: French Revolution, otherwise he would have gone longer, right, And
Speaker 1: Louis the fourteenth, known as the Sun King. He loved
Speaker 1: animals and enthusiastically assembled probably the largest sioux of its
Speaker 1: time at Versailles, basically for himself and a few friends. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then Louis the fifteenth was only sort of into it,
Speaker 1: and Louis the sixteenth had no interest, basically never went.
Speaker 3: Do you think if Louis the sixteenth had like opened
Speaker 3: the zoo up to the public, among other things like
Speaker 3: making sure they had enough to eat, I think that
Speaker 3: might have given him a pretty good chance of not getting,
Speaker 3: you know, his head chopped off, because like if he's like, look, guys,
Speaker 3: a free zoo day for the public and also maybe
Speaker 3: some food, and then I think, you know, you might
Speaker 3: have smoothed things over.
Speaker 1: That is pretty much an argument, Like it wouldn't have
Speaker 1: prevented the French Revolution. But it gets us into takeaway
Speaker 1: number one. Modern zoos were invented by French revolutionaries in
Speaker 1: Paris and a French born emperor in Vienna.
Speaker 3: That's really interesting, I kind of because I was gonna
Speaker 3: mention the fact that Versailles like opened up to the
Speaker 3: public after the revolution, Like at first they were going
Speaker 3: to destroy it out of anger. Yeah, and then some
Speaker 3: of them were like, oh wait, hang on, this is
Speaker 3: actually pretty sick, Like what if we just made this
Speaker 3: basically a big museum for the public to be able
Speaker 3: to see? Was that kind of like where like did
Speaker 3: they open up the zoo to people? At that point?
Speaker 1: The basically relocated it because also Versilles outside the city,
Speaker 1: but they basically put the animals they could gather into
Speaker 1: a former royal botanical garden in Paris.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: And that was the basis of the first Paris zoo.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And in a very separate way, a very absolutist and
Speaker 1: royal leader accidentally established a public Vienna zoo. And those
Speaker 1: are the two key zoos of most modern zoos happening
Speaker 1: from there.
Speaker 3: I mean, I'm glad that the revolution sort of like
Speaker 3: had the wherewithal not to hold all the animals accountable
Speaker 3: for the royals, because like, how would you even get
Speaker 3: a giraffe in a guillotine and what like what part
Speaker 3: of the neck would you go for?
Speaker 1: Yeah, if a rebel tries to figure out that problem,
Speaker 1: they clearly just like cutting people's heads off. It's not ideological.
Speaker 1: They're just a serial killer at that point. So this
Speaker 1: is the two weirdly separate but also dovetailing stories of
Speaker 1: the Paris zo and the Vienna zoo because they both
Speaker 1: came out of movements to make zoos for the public, right,
Speaker 1: like a zoo should be something that benefits the public,
Speaker 1: and the previous nearly four thousand years, zoos were for
Speaker 1: a few rich guys or just one rich guy. Yes,
Speaker 1: most of politics and society has changed in this direction,
Speaker 1: and zoos are an example of it.
Speaker 3: I mean it was like a modern version of it
Speaker 3: would be like, uh, what's his name? El Chapo? Right,
Speaker 3: like he had a bunch of animals that oh kept around.
Speaker 1: And later in the show, we'll talk about Pablo Escobar
Speaker 1: ahead a zoo.
Speaker 3: Ah yeah, Pablo Escobar as well. Yeah, like he had
Speaker 3: he had like he's basically his own private zoo.
Speaker 1: Yeah that in a few weird ways remains modern. But yeah,
Speaker 1: this basically the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution a
Speaker 1: lot to change that, Yeah, really like ethic of zoos
Speaker 1: for the public and for science and for conservation, like
Speaker 1: a few good things all at once. That is really
Speaker 1: from the late seventeen hundreds in Paris and Vienna. And
Speaker 1: the separate way it happens in Paris is that there's
Speaker 1: a French revolution. Especially if folks heard the recent episode
Speaker 1: about the Bass Deal. We describe hunger and also inequality
Speaker 1: as to key drivers of the entire French Revolution, and
Speaker 1: opening up the zoo wouldn't have prevented the whole revolution
Speaker 1: or something. But revolutionaries like the Jacobins specifically held up
Speaker 1: Louis the Sixteenth animal Menagerie because the word zoo didn't
Speaker 1: exist yet, these were usually called animal menageries.
Speaker 3: They held thee like menagerie as a word a lot.
Speaker 1: It's quite good, yeah, and so French, so you know,
Speaker 1: it makes sense for them. They held up Louis the
Speaker 1: Sixteenth Menagerie as one of the most disgusting and wasteful
Speaker 1: royal things, mainly on the grounds that the animals were
Speaker 1: well fed, while most French people starved. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: an inequality thing.
Speaker 3: It's gotta be so frustrating for you to be an
Speaker 3: angry French person who can barely feed your family and
Speaker 3: you're seeing your own children starve, and then you're hearing about,
Speaker 3: you know, some giraffe getting fed macaroons, like that's not
Speaker 3: that's not a tenable situation.
Speaker 1: Right right. And also a word got out that Louis
Speaker 1: the sixteenth was fully continuing to fund his grandfather and
Speaker 1: great grandfather's zoo without any real interest in it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: to the point that apparently his courtiers and staff made
Speaker 1: a new map of Versailles in seventeen eighty one just
Speaker 1: so people like the king could know where everything was,
Speaker 1: but he was so uninterested in his zoo they didn't
Speaker 1: even put it on the map of his own palace
Speaker 1: when it's a zoo just for him. So people were
Speaker 1: really mad. They were like, why are you feeding lions
Speaker 1: and not humans in this country? The switch that flips
Speaker 1: is basically, all of the positives of a zoo are
Speaker 1: positive if we make them for everybody instead of just
Speaker 1: one rich guy. And so that's how the French co
Speaker 1: invented the modern zoo in Paris. The one pushback was
Speaker 1: that a lot of the revolutionaries wanted to maintain the
Speaker 1: main botanical garden in Paris without letting animals ruin it.
Speaker 1: They just worried that like animals would trample the rare plants.
Speaker 1: But once they sorted that out, they moved many of
Speaker 1: the versimon Agerie animals to the Jaudins duplant, which just
Speaker 1: means botanical garden, plant garden. They turned what was a
Speaker 1: waste of royal wealth into a pillar of public good.
Speaker 1: They said, this demonstrates France's global influence. It's for public education,
Speaker 1: it's for edification, it's for entertainment. And within a couple
Speaker 1: of years, the French revolutionaries were using their military partly
Speaker 1: to gather new animals for their new zoo in the
Speaker 1: middle of Paris.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's I mean, they must have really freaking loved
Speaker 3: those animals.
Speaker 1: They were really big fans. Yeah, and apparently they ate
Speaker 1: a few of them. And also but the ones that
Speaker 1: they could move easily they moved.
Speaker 3: They were very hungry. They were very hungry. Yeah, to
Speaker 3: be fair, they did not have cake, which was Mary
Speaker 3: Antoinette's fatal mistake.
Speaker 1: And yeah, and then separately, because it's totally monarchical, but
Speaker 1: otherwise for similar reasons, the Archduke of Austria and Holy
Speaker 1: Roman Emperor in Vienna sort of accidentally started a public
Speaker 1: zoo before the French did.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was.
Speaker 1: Initially a new menagerie, but it was set up by
Speaker 1: a guy named Franz Stephen who was initially just born
Speaker 1: as the Duke of Lorraine. It's a French and sort
Speaker 1: of Germanic. But he married his second cousin, who was
Speaker 1: Maria Teresa.
Speaker 3: They did that all the time back then. Guys. Everyone
Speaker 3: calm down right.
Speaker 1: Like second instead of first is pretty good for the
Speaker 1: seventeen hundreds.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's pretty good. That's like kim a little far
Speaker 3: afield of the family bloodline there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, starting to fork the tree. Great, but he so
Speaker 1: he married into an incredibly powerful royal line then got
Speaker 1: to be sort of the main person, partly through patriarchy.
Speaker 1: So Franz Stephan, this Frenchish nobleman, is suddenly Archduke of
Speaker 1: Austria and the Holy Roman Emperor, and he's living in
Speaker 1: Europe's second biggest palace after Versailles. It's called shun Brun.
Speaker 1: It's in Vienna. And this is seventeen fifty two. So
Speaker 1: he is an absolute monarch of a huge amount of Europe,
Speaker 1: and he says, I really like animals. I'm building a
Speaker 1: zoo for myself. But unlike a lot of other menageries,
Speaker 1: Franz Stephan's next couple heirs not only kept it up
Speaker 1: but also subscribed to a philosophy called enlightened absolutism. Interesting,
Speaker 1: go on, It's the goal is basically, what if all
Speaker 1: of our dictators were just perfect people? Right, Like, what
Speaker 1: if they were just incredibly generous and we just get
Speaker 1: lucky every time?
Speaker 3: I mean, that would be great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, his heirs as soon as the seventeen seventies start
Speaker 1: allowing a few hours of public visitors to their animal collection.
Speaker 1: If the visitors wear formal clothing. You know, it was
Speaker 1: like extraordinary limited just for the rich zoo visiting. And
Speaker 1: it is a zoo to this day. The former menagerie
Speaker 1: of schunbren Palace pretty seamlessly morphed into being a public
Speaker 1: Vienna zoo. Right, and when you look at the zoo
Speaker 1: map you can tell it used to be a Versailles
Speaker 1: type garden.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And just for the record, these Vienna guys, they
Speaker 3: didn't get their heads chopped.
Speaker 1: Off they did not.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, well see yeah, give the people a zoo,
Speaker 3: probably food too. That's I feel like I'd be a
Speaker 3: very good, enlightened absolutist because I'd be like, first of all,
Speaker 3: we should be giving people cake. I think they'd be
Speaker 3: super into that, and then also a zoo, and you know,
Speaker 3: that's my pitch to be voted empress.
Speaker 1: It was basically two completely different governments with the same
Speaker 1: theoretical ideals. The French Revolution was liberty, agality, fraternity, and
Speaker 1: the Austrian Archduke was I have all of the power
Speaker 1: and I will do liberty, agality, fraternity for you guys,
Speaker 1: except that you never get any power, and so you.
Speaker 3: Know, yeah, I promise to be good. I promise I'll
Speaker 3: be really good.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And also not really egalitarian anything, because we're still
Speaker 1: having nobility and stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeh yeah, yeah, yeah, so I'll be good to you know,
Speaker 3: the top like ten percent of you.
Speaker 1: But both those from separate routes. Enlightenment driven zoos in
Speaker 1: Paris and Vienna templated a lot of the rest of
Speaker 1: the worlds, like you have waves of zoo building in England,
Speaker 1: the Netherlands, Belgium, German speaking places. Later the US after
Speaker 1: the Civil War there, and especially the layout of zoos.
Speaker 1: A lot of zoos have like big broad paths and
Speaker 1: lots of wonderful plants too. That's specifically inspired by the
Speaker 1: Paris Zoo and the Vienna Zoo both being built in
Speaker 1: royal gardens and like imitating that shape and that landscaping.
Speaker 1: And that also led to the word zoo because instead
Speaker 1: of calling them menageries, they called them zoological gardens or
Speaker 1: zoological parks because it's the science of zoology. Plus what's
Speaker 1: obviously a garden or park because it was recently, and
Speaker 1: then we shortened that to zoo, but that's where the
Speaker 1: word comes from.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Paris and Vienna botanical gardens, if it's a good one,
Speaker 3: those are awesome. I love them so much.
Speaker 1: They're really good.
Speaker 3: Like when I was a kid, they sounded so boring
Speaker 3: as a kid, but then you go and you're surrounded
Speaker 3: by the weirdest, funkiest plants.
Speaker 1: I felt the same. Yeah, I'm only starting to appreciate
Speaker 1: them now. I was walked through the sullenly before. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it really only took about one hundred and fifty years
Speaker 1: for zoos to go from the private menagerie of one
Speaker 1: royal to a public institution for public good, especially because
Speaker 1: rich people funded a lot of them initially and then
Speaker 1: didn't want to keep it up. The Paris and Vienna
Speaker 1: origins are sort of unique and more common. Thing happened
Speaker 1: in London in eighteen twenty two. Rich people and upper
Speaker 1: middle class people in London created the Zoological Club of
Speaker 1: the Linnaean Society and they founded a London zoo, but
Speaker 1: also made it exclusive to the members of the society
Speaker 1: who paid before it. Right for about a century early
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds into the early nineteen hundreds, a lot of
Speaker 1: zoos were either from a philanthropic club or a like
Speaker 1: joint stock company basically a corporation that would restrict it
Speaker 1: to just the people who paid for it, But then
Speaker 1: their kids and grandkids and great grandkids didn't want to
Speaker 1: keep paying for it, and then those zoos basically got
Speaker 1: transition to public governments, and then public governments doubled down
Speaker 1: the focus of science and education and the other positive
Speaker 1: things like it became seen as a pillar like libraries
Speaker 1: and museums of society.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it's like they probably started out just a
Speaker 3: bunch of top hat wearing guys going around, yeah, poking
Speaker 3: tigers with their ostentatious canes. And then you know, now,
Speaker 3: now it's a lot better.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's a middle set that kind of made
Speaker 1: some sense. Zoo membership now is just your family gets one,
Speaker 1: but before it was I'm a member of the zoo
Speaker 1: because I pay for it like a GM or something.
Speaker 1: You know, right right there just weren't enough descendants of
Speaker 1: those rich people who wanted to keep feeding the lions personally,
Speaker 1: all on their own, and then it became public and
Speaker 1: that has influenced every listener's experience of zoos Paris Fianna
Speaker 1: and then the progression from there.
Speaker 3: Right because they were still modeled after what those original
Speaker 3: zoos were like exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and folks, this is a mega takeaway and so
Speaker 1: many numbers and zoos were going to come back with
Speaker 1: a few more short takeaways. After a quick break, folks,
Speaker 1: we're back and we have two further takeaways about zoos.
Speaker 1: They're also going to be, I would say, much stranger
Speaker 1: than the previous chunk of the show. The first one
Speaker 1: is takeaway number two. One Guy in Hamburg, Germany established
Speaker 1: the worst ever concept for a zoo and separately established
Speaker 1: one of the best ideas for zookeeping.
Speaker 3: All right, let me guess underwater zoo and then best idea,
Speaker 3: all the animals get little hats.
Speaker 1: What you said underwaters you I thought about like the
Speaker 1: glass that you watched the polar bears and dolphins through
Speaker 1: in the water. I was like, what's the bad idea?
Speaker 1: What's the bad idea? Right right, right now? The ideas
Speaker 1: are even better and even worse. And this is the
Speaker 1: story of Carl hagen Beck.
Speaker 3: That's the name.
Speaker 1: No one knows his name, but Carl hagen Beck almost
Speaker 1: made zoos a major crime against humanity and then also
Speaker 1: improve them in a way that most of us enjoy
Speaker 1: to this day. And I want to be clear that
Speaker 1: both those ideas happened separately, Like we didn't need the
Speaker 1: bad thing for the good thing. The bad thing was
Speaker 1: just bad. Oh oh, the bad thing was human zoos.
Speaker 1: He exhibited ethnicities of people to white Europeans.
Speaker 3: I was afraid this was coming. Yeah, I've actually I've
Speaker 3: read a little bit about this. That's a oh boy. Anyways,
Speaker 3: continue Alex.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like important and we'll just lay out what
Speaker 1: it is. And then his completely separate good idea. People
Speaker 1: call it stuff like the Hagenback Revolution, like it truly
Speaker 1: changed zoo keeping. The short version of it is. Until
Speaker 1: relatively recently, like into the early nineteen hundreds, most zoos
Speaker 1: just displayed their animals inside of small metal cages like
Speaker 1: metal bars.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And Hagenbeck's idea was one of the main features
Speaker 1: is what's called architectural ditches, which is where you give
Speaker 1: your animal a big open space. You know, maybe they
Speaker 1: want more space, because many animals do, but it's a
Speaker 1: big open space, and then the separation between you and
Speaker 1: them is a moat or an open space, like just
Speaker 1: a big gap that they can't cross right, And then
Speaker 1: it's better for everybody involved. It's improved every zoo ever.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: And he just had both those ideas separately and is
Speaker 1: kind of the worst and best person and in the
Speaker 1: history of modern zeus. Yeah, but really just the worst.
Speaker 1: I think somebody else could have come up with the ditches.
Speaker 3: I feel like that was an inevitable innovation.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I hear and the butt is coming and it
Speaker 3: is a very large butt.
Speaker 1: And Carl Hagenbeck also bothered to innovate zoos because he's
Speaker 1: one of the first people ever to inherit a zoo
Speaker 1: without being royalty. His dad was in the zoo business,
Speaker 1: and they were not wealthy people. Carl Hagenbeck was born
Speaker 1: in eighteen forty four in Hamburg. His father was both
Speaker 1: a fishmonger and an animal enthusiast. A fishmonger sells fish,
Speaker 1: they don't catch the fish. And one day some fishermen
Speaker 1: gave Klaus Hagenbeck some live seals that just got caught
Speaker 1: and trapped in their nets. And Klaus already owned a
Speaker 1: few other exotic pets, and so he built wooden tubs
Speaker 1: for the seals, a few other displays for other animals,
Speaker 1: and charged people one shilling to look at.
Speaker 3: It, one shilling CCO, one shilling CEO.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And this was the eighteen fifties, so like Paris
Speaker 1: and Vienna and a few cities have modern issu zues,
Speaker 1: but this major German city of Hamburg did not yet.
Speaker 1: So Klaus was filling the vacuum with like an amateur
Speaker 1: fly by night zoo.
Speaker 3: So he was like, he was like seal king.
Speaker 1: Yeah, seal king basically yeah. And then in eighteen fifty
Speaker 1: nine he takes his fourteen year old son Carl and says,
Speaker 1: you're not going to school. You now run a zoo.
Speaker 3: You know how excited I would have been to hear
Speaker 3: those words when I was a kid. I know, I
Speaker 3: dream I dreamed of hearing that all the time. You
Speaker 3: know what, No more school, You run a zoo now.
Speaker 1: Yes. And so then Carl is like a zoo small businessman.
Speaker 1: He really needs the zoo to keep making money, otherwise
Speaker 1: he'll go broken. It all folds and there's a German
Speaker 1: economic downturn in the eighteen seventies, and then he commits
Speaker 1: a crime against humanity. To try to solve it, he
Speaker 1: starts a human zoo. Yeah, and if folks have heard
Speaker 1: the passive episode about world's fairs, we talk about some
Speaker 1: world's fairs also doing that for what they thought were
Speaker 1: positive scientific principles of eugenics. And so in Hamburg, Carl
Speaker 1: Hagenbeck puts up really the first ever human zoo in
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy five. Yeah, it's an exhibit of two families
Speaker 1: of indigenous Sami people from Scandinavia along with tools, sleds, dogs,
Speaker 1: and thirty one reindeer. And like the public would watch
Speaker 1: them milk the reindeer at specific times. And this was
Speaker 1: a massive hit and then he made more exhibits of
Speaker 1: more ethnicities.
Speaker 3: So this was like, to be clear, like this was
Speaker 3: separate from slavery, right, like were these people enslaved or
Speaker 3: were they sort of this was more sort of like
Speaker 3: economic coercion.
Speaker 1: Great question, and it's a mix of economic coercion, and
Speaker 1: apparently a few of the participants are considered to have
Speaker 1: been like actively into it, like this is better pay
Speaker 1: than I'd ever make, but that's still coercion to me.
Speaker 1: Being kept in an exhibit doesn't seem like anyone was
Speaker 1: captured quite But he did various exhibits of people. Apparently,
Speaker 1: one featuring Sudanese people was such a hit that drew
Speaker 1: sixty two thousand spectators in one day. He also failed
Speaker 1: to vaccinate or protect these people from European diseases, and
Speaker 1: so many of the exhibit people died. Oh boy, it's
Speaker 1: just horrible. Yeah, oh my god.
Speaker 3: It's like maybe he was taking better care of the
Speaker 3: animals than the people at that point, because Jesus like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, potentially, yeah yeah. And this also to society's credit,
Speaker 1: this got pushed back from jump Like even the very
Speaker 1: first exhibit, people said that's weird, like this is racist
Speaker 1: and negatives. Yeah, but not enough people said that, and
Speaker 1: so crowds came.
Speaker 3: Like that is typically like when you hear about and
Speaker 3: a thing that is atrocious from the past, particularly when
Speaker 3: it relates to like race, there usually are contemporaries who
Speaker 3: are like, this is messed up, who were just simply ignored.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and so and then Hagenbeck kicked this off
Speaker 1: as a trend in zoos and World's fairs for about
Speaker 1: thirty years. That the end came in the early nineteen
Speaker 1: hundreds and was also the all time low point in
Speaker 1: US zoo history because at the nineteen oh four World's
Speaker 1: Fair there was an exhibit of a man named Ota
Speaker 1: Benga from Central Africa, and then two years later the
Speaker 1: Bronx Zoo tried exhibiting him, and according to the Smithsonian,
Speaker 1: this experiment was halted following complaints and remains an isolated case.
Speaker 1: So that that's the all time low point in American
Speaker 1: zoo history is that, you know, like a guy named
Speaker 1: William Hornaday, who did a lot to save the bison,
Speaker 1: also exhibited Ode Benga in a zoo and that was
Speaker 1: part of the history of it.
Speaker 3: Well because probably in a sick way, right like the
Speaker 3: same kind of like care and the idea of like
Speaker 3: animal husbandry can extend to human beings if you don't
Speaker 3: see them as the same as yourself, right, Like it's
Speaker 3: the paternalistic I must be sort of the father of
Speaker 3: the land and the caretaker of the land can extend
Speaker 3: to people if you don't really see them as people.
Speaker 1: A hundred percent that was their thinking. And yeah, some
Speaker 1: of these World's Fair people especially were proud. They were like,
Speaker 1: look at what we're showing and educating people about race,
Speaker 1: and they were just wrong about race. And yeah, and
Speaker 1: then hagen Beck received that message in his own time,
Speaker 1: and especially toward the end of his exhibits going truly poorly,
Speaker 1: totally separately, he tries to improve the keeping of animals
Speaker 1: and zeos and does so. And one thing he did
Speaker 1: is helped to lead the trend toward gathering animals by
Speaker 1: ecosystem rather than by taxonomy. Like instead of building a
Speaker 1: reptile house, you build an exhibit of animals in a place,
Speaker 1: including the reptiles there, and an exhibit of another ecosystem
Speaker 1: including the reptiles and so on. Yeah, which is the
Speaker 1: logic of a lot of zoos today. Like Brookfield they
Speaker 1: had an old reptile house because that's old, and then
Speaker 1: their new exhibits were environments. That's an ongoing trend.
Speaker 3: I think that's generally the structure of the San Diego Zoo,
Speaker 3: except for insects because that's kind of hard.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the size to.
Speaker 3: Integrate the insects, it's a normal I mean, they're there,
Speaker 3: but you can't see him.
Speaker 1: Oh in Brookfield had a small mammal house, which was awesome.
Speaker 1: It's so good, but it's the size. Yeah, just making
Speaker 1: exhibits work better. Hagenbeck did that four animals, and he
Speaker 1: became so committed to a whole new way of zoo
Speaker 1: keeping that in the early nineteen hundreds he constructed a
Speaker 1: whole new zoo next to his previous zoo, and he
Speaker 1: hoped and Tierpark Hagenbeck in nineteen oh seven Tierpark means
Speaker 1: animal park, and it blew the world's mind with the
Speaker 1: first architectural ditches and open instead of cage exhibits for
Speaker 1: mostly the larger non predator animals. Initially, he also built
Speaker 1: a larger version of it a few years later, called
Speaker 1: the Panorama Zoo. That the entire hook was there's not
Speaker 1: bars between you and the animals and the animals have
Speaker 1: at least a little more space, and that spread worldwide
Speaker 1: within a couple decades. It's a huge head idea. It's
Speaker 1: influenced every zoo you've ever been to.
Speaker 3: I mean, in addition to that being much better for
Speaker 3: the animals, it's a much more exciting experience for the person,
Speaker 3: right because you get to see them doing stuff and
Speaker 3: if not their natural environment, at least a facsimile of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Really, it's simply great all around. And Carl Hagenbeck is
Speaker 1: an extraordinarily complicated person to have had that great innovation
Speaker 1: and spread it worldwide, just separately from doing horrible things.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So it seems to be a pretty common theme
Speaker 3: throughout history, Like, ah, this guy did something really cool.
Speaker 1: He hated women, though, and he's also a case of
Speaker 1: society doing a good job pushing back against his bad
Speaker 1: idea and running with his good idea. It's good that
Speaker 1: people all over the world shaped what he tried to
Speaker 1: do in a positive direction all around. Yeah, so, good
Speaker 1: job everybody. Good job protesting at the Bronx Zoo and
Speaker 1: so on when they tried to display a person.
Speaker 3: Good job for rejecting the idea human zoo. Yes, it's
Speaker 3: a low bar. It's a very low bar, but we
Speaker 3: managed to get over it.
Speaker 1: And yeah, and then our last takeaway about a completely
Speaker 1: different weird thing takeaway number three, the private zoos of
Speaker 1: Pablo Escobar and William Randolph Hurst accidentally established hippo and
Speaker 1: zebra populations in the Americas.
Speaker 3: Oh whoa. I was aware that Hurst had weird animals
Speaker 3: around his very strange estate and that a lot of
Speaker 3: them had kind of escaped.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's left a population of more than one
Speaker 1: hundred zebras near Highway one on the central coast of California.
Speaker 1: That's wow, they're doing their thing out there. And then
Speaker 1: there's more than one hundred hippopotamuses in Colombia because of
Speaker 1: the narco terrorist and drug lord Pablo Escobar keeping hippos
Speaker 1: and then letting them get out. And like in the
Speaker 1: numbers in the beginning we talked about ancient private zoos,
Speaker 1: royal private zoos. This is a way that modern weird,
Speaker 1: rich kai private zoos can.
Speaker 3: Go that desire that rich people have, or even just
Speaker 3: eccentric people with enough money like Tiger King to be like,
Speaker 3: you know what, I just want to have some chunk
Speaker 3: of exotic nature.
Speaker 1: For me, right, yeah, yeah, and it gets so weird
Speaker 1: and can get weird in different ways of making money.
Speaker 1: William Randolph Hurst is media titan Pablo Escobar adult drugs.
Speaker 1: Escobar was based in Mediine amassed tens of billions of dollars.
Speaker 1: He's arguably the wealthiest criminal in human history. But one
Speaker 1: weird indicator of his wealth is one of his employees.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty five, The Guardian interviewed Tirso Dominguez, who
Speaker 1: was one of his former airplane pilots and just being
Speaker 1: one of Escobar's airplane pilots, Dimingaz claims to have owned
Speaker 1: thirty Lamborghinis wow, and each day when he put on
Speaker 1: his shirt, he would then select the car that matched
Speaker 1: the shirt to drive around. So anyway, Escobar truly outrageous wealth.
Speaker 1: And one thing he did is at his estate is
Speaker 1: set up a private zoo and then also later in
Speaker 1: his run of crime, he opened it to the public
Speaker 1: to try to gain favor with ordinary Colombians against the authorities,
Speaker 1: Like this is my whole thing.
Speaker 3: Right if you don't want to, if you're really rich
Speaker 3: and powerful and you don't want to get got you
Speaker 3: got to give people a.
Speaker 1: Zoo, right, right, and like Hearst never really did that
Speaker 1: because Hurst had the government on his side, partly by
Speaker 1: almost controlling the government in the United States. Right. So
Speaker 1: it's it's very different.
Speaker 3: Yeah, have you been to the Hearst Castle in it
Speaker 3: it's I've been. It's very strange. It's like a bunch
Speaker 3: of different styles of architecture all mashed together, just a
Speaker 3: bunch of like weird opulence. I wouldn't say it's nice looking.
Speaker 3: It's just kind of a bit of lunacy, a bit
Speaker 3: of rich lunacy, where it's very gaudy, very very strange.
Speaker 3: I think that was actually the only time I believe
Speaker 3: I saw a condor on the drive up to it.
Speaker 1: That makes sense because apparently people see lots of interesting
Speaker 1: wildlife in the area of Hurst Castle. It's a relatively
Speaker 1: remote part of California there. Yeah, back to Escobar quick
Speaker 1: he gathered every exotic animal he could think of, But
Speaker 1: he also had a basically principle of large predators are
Speaker 1: too hard to keep, too much meat, too much security,
Speaker 1: which might be smart, I don't know, yes, But so
Speaker 1: then he kept every large herbivore or won't eat a
Speaker 1: human that he could think of. He had zebras, giraffes, kangaroos, rhinoceroses, elephants, ostriches,
Speaker 1: and a set of four nile hippopotamuses.
Speaker 3: I mean, a hippo, while not perhaps consuming the human,
Speaker 3: will certainly tear a human apart given the chance.
Speaker 1: That seems to be part of the problem, because then Escobar,
Speaker 1: eventually he's killed by his enemies and the authorities. His
Speaker 1: estate falls into ruin. But there's this huge five year
Speaker 1: period where the estate is not controlled by Escobar because
Speaker 1: he's dead, but also nobody's watching the animals closely, and
Speaker 1: the least approachable controllable animal he happened to gather was hippos.
Speaker 1: And during those five years, his four hippos took over
Speaker 1: an artificial pond reproduced in it. And then that hippo
Speaker 1: population just got out, trampled farms, menaced people, and those
Speaker 1: hippos have exploded into a population of at least several dozen,
Speaker 1: possibly more than two hundred. The New York Times cites
Speaker 1: experts who claim that by twenty thirty five of the
Speaker 1: country of Columbia might have more than a thousand hippos,
Speaker 1: all from this tiny four hippo gene pool from Pablo
Speaker 1: Escobar Zoo.
Speaker 3: It's so funny because invasive species are very common, but
Speaker 3: a hippo is like, it's the funniest invasive species because
Speaker 3: it's like it's not good like they are. It's it's
Speaker 3: not a good thing to just have wandering around. Its bad. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm sure they have an impact on the environment, but
Speaker 3: also they're just high, they're so aggressive, and they're enormous.
Speaker 1: That's kind of the all around way people feel in
Speaker 1: Colombia today, apparently because they're definitely an ecological menace. They
Speaker 1: devour too much plant life and then their feceson water
Speaker 1: spreads harmful bacteria and algae because it feeds on it.
Speaker 1: And in twenty twenty three, the government proposed sterilizing as
Speaker 1: much of the herd as possible to like wind it
Speaker 1: down that way.
Speaker 3: Right, good, like getting cloked, Like what are you gonna do?
Speaker 3: Oh all right, it's your job now to castrate this hippo.
Speaker 3: Good freaking luck.
Speaker 1: And apparently they have not begun because it's hard. The
Speaker 1: plan was to put like, of course it's hard. Their
Speaker 1: stated plan was to put caches of vegetables in big
Speaker 1: pad and then let veterinarians sterilize the hippos from there,
Speaker 1: but come on, this is not gonna work.
Speaker 3: Come on.
Speaker 1: And then, also, because hippos are basically funny and interesting,
Speaker 1: they're sort of a favorite local symbol. In many places
Speaker 1: in Colombia, there's statues of hippos, and Escobar's former property
Speaker 1: is now a place people visit for fun. There's a
Speaker 1: little bit of a theme park, and that includes a
Speaker 1: giant pink mascot hippo named Vanessa okay, who like greets
Speaker 1: guests to Escabar's former estate. Well, so his weird zoo
Speaker 1: made Colombia a hippo country. There's no endemic hippos in
Speaker 1: the Americas, No.
Speaker 3: I mean, once your country's been taken over by hippos,
Speaker 3: you do kind of have to embrace it.
Speaker 1: I guess that's kind of what people are saying. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're like, I don't know, this is just part of
Speaker 1: the deal now. But it seems unsustainable.
Speaker 3: Too, you like, when the hippos come, it's just like
Speaker 3: you just got to accept it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And in a separate way, that's happened with Zebras
Speaker 1: on the central coast of California. There are no endemic
Speaker 1: Zebras in North America.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, no kidding.
Speaker 1: William Randolph Hurst. The pop culture touchstone is Citizen Kane.
Speaker 1: That movie by Orson Wells is a fictionalization of Hurst,
Speaker 1: right basically, an incredibly wealthy and sad newspaper titan who
Speaker 1: was also specifically known for sloppy and scandalous journalistic practices.
Speaker 1: His newspapers are a major reason, maybe the reason, the
Speaker 1: United States declared war on Spain in eighteen ninety eight
Speaker 1: and seized colonial territories from Puerto Rico to the Philippines.
Speaker 1: He also failed to run for president in nineteen oh four.
Speaker 1: Late in life, he made public statements in favor of
Speaker 1: the Nazi Party in Germany and then along the way.
Speaker 3: He's basically he's basically Elon Musk of the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and like he made a vast fortune doing different
Speaker 1: bad things. To me, it's not drugs. But also he
Speaker 1: swung American society with his media reach and would write
Speaker 1: personal columns about why we should be more right wing
Speaker 1: and why Hitler's fixing Germany and a lot of.
Speaker 3: Yellow journalism right, like a lot of just sort of tabloids, yes,
Speaker 3: like you know, kind of like a rupert.
Speaker 1: Murdoch type made all media worse.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like where it's like, here's something it's not necessarily true,
Speaker 3: but it'll sell papers.
Speaker 1: Hurst also liked animals, and so he builds this vast
Speaker 1: estate centering on a castle on the central coast of California.
Speaker 1: It's near a modern town named San Simeon, and it
Speaker 1: had a private combination ranch and zoo sprawling across tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of acres. Apparently, in order to get from
Speaker 1: the entrance of the estate to the castle, you had
Speaker 1: to drive five miles down a private road. WHOA, you've
Speaker 1: probably done it.
Speaker 3: I think so. I think that's might have been where
Speaker 3: I saw the condor. But yeah, it's just like it's
Speaker 3: a like really long car ride to get from one
Speaker 3: point of the estate to the other.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And apparently this sparked both real stories and apocryphal
Speaker 1: legends about Hearst's wild exotic animals crisscrossing the road because
Speaker 1: they had some of the run of the place. And
Speaker 1: the wildest, probably apocryphal story, is that Winston Churchill visited
Speaker 1: and when he tried to drive down the road at
Speaker 1: Giraffe was stubborn and got in the way. It was
Speaker 1: just this really weird place all around.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like, well, it's this story I want to
Speaker 3: have happened, right, Like Winston Churchill just really flustered in
Speaker 3: irate because there's a giraffe in the road.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he like tries to defeat at some of his
Speaker 1: champagne or something like I don't know, I don't know
Speaker 1: what to do it like.
Speaker 3: It like sort of like goes and snatches the hat
Speaker 3: off his head, like you know, his cigar falls out
Speaker 3: in astonishment.
Speaker 1: The real weirdest thing is that Hurst, before he dies,
Speaker 1: starts to have money troubles, and so he starts selling
Speaker 1: a gifting animals in the late nineteen thirties. His favorite
Speaker 1: was zebras, and he tried to keep the zebras. They
Speaker 1: stay in an enclosure, but then the fence gets knocked
Speaker 1: down in a storm, and before herst remaining employees can
Speaker 1: handle it, some of the zebras get loose, and there's
Speaker 1: now a wild herd of more than one hundred individuals
Speaker 1: near San Simeon, California.
Speaker 3: That's I've never seen those wild zebras, but uh, I
Speaker 3: imagine there's something to look at, like, because I know
Speaker 3: there's like some wild horse populations in various parts of
Speaker 3: the US. But yeah, yeah, yeah, that's crazy.
Speaker 1: It's basically another one of those, but in an invasive
Speaker 1: way and specifically from a private zoo. And yeah, according
Speaker 1: to UC Berkeley wildlife ecologist Justin Brischer's, the zebras might
Speaker 1: continue thriving there. The dry and hilly coastal ecosystem works
Speaker 1: for them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's kind of savannah.
Speaker 1: Like exactly, and so their only trouble is really too
Speaker 1: weird predators. It's human hunters who say, hey, I could
Speaker 1: catch a zebra down the street, like cool, okay. And
Speaker 1: the other one is California has a long running project
Speaker 1: to try to save its mountain lions, yes, which are endemic,
Speaker 1: and the zebras work for them is pray like it
Speaker 1: works out.
Speaker 3: That's gotta be so thrilling for a mountain lion. Like
Speaker 3: you're used to like, okay, another like another deer, another rat,
Speaker 3: another rabbit, and then you just get a hole zebra.
Speaker 1: Right, or you get too used to zebras and don't
Speaker 1: have any perspective and you're like, right, ooh, a bunny
Speaker 1: like you just are you just are unlike all other
Speaker 1: mountain lions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, folks.
Speaker 1: That's the main episode for this week. I'm so glad
Speaker 1: Katie is back from her somewhere and welcome to the
Speaker 1: outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering
Speaker 1: this episode with a runback through the big takeaways. A
Speaker 1: mega takeaway number one modern zoos were invented by French
Speaker 1: revolutionaries in Paris and a French born emperor in Vienna.
Speaker 1: Takeaway number two. Carl Hagenbeck in Hamburg, Germany established the
Speaker 1: world's worst concept for a zoo and separately established one
Speaker 1: of the best modern practices in zoo keeping. Takeaway number three,
Speaker 1: the private zoos of Pablo Escobar and William Randolph Hurst
Speaker 1: established hippo and zebra populations in the Americas. And then
Speaker 1: a really enormous numbers section this week about US and
Speaker 1: global zoos, the most popular zoos in the world, the
Speaker 1: most amazing zoo babies and zoo moms in recent news,
Speaker 1: and also the most ancient zoos in human history. Those
Speaker 1: are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode
Speaker 1: because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you
Speaker 1: right now if you support this show at maximumfund dot org.
Speaker 1: Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get
Speaker 1: a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously
Speaker 1: incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's
Speaker 1: bonus topic is the theory that the modern us state
Speaker 1: of Florida is a giant informal zoo. Visit sifpod dot
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Speaker 1: and a catalog of all sorts of max funbonus shows.
Speaker 1: It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to
Speaker 1: everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun thanks check
Speaker 1: out our research sources on this episode's page at maximumfund
Speaker 1: dot org. Key sources this week include two excellent Skott
Speaker 1: Early books. One is called The Modern Arc, The Story
Speaker 1: of Zoo's Past, Present, and Future, that is by author
Speaker 1: and NPR journalist Vicky Croke. The other is called Zoo,
Speaker 1: a History of Zoological Gardens in the West, co written
Speaker 1: by Eric Barrete and Elizabeth Hardoin Fougier, who are professors
Speaker 1: at Universi Te Jean Moulon in Leon, France. Another key
Speaker 1: source this week is Smithsonian Magazine, a feature by Kara
Speaker 1: Parks about the Zoo in Vienna at the former schoon
Speaker 1: Brune Palace, also a feature by Shows Parks about Carl Hagenback.
Speaker 1: She cites experts like historian Nigel Rothfels of the University
Speaker 1: of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and then lots more resources from The
Speaker 1: New York Times, see Not the Big Think, The Guardian,
Speaker 1: and other trusted journalism. That page also features resources such
Speaker 1: as Native Dashland dot CA. I'm using those to acknowledge
Speaker 1: that I recorded this in Lenape, hooking the traditional land
Speaker 1: of the Muncy Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as
Speaker 1: well as the Mohican people, Scatagoque people, and others. Also,
Speaker 1: Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I
Speaker 1: want to acknowledge in my location, in many other locations
Speaker 1: in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much
Speaker 1: still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and
Speaker 1: join the Free Sift discord, where we're sharing stories and
Speaker 1: resources about Native people and life. There is a link
Speaker 1: in this episode's description to join the discord. We're also
Speaker 1: talking about this episode on the discord, and Hey, would
Speaker 1: you like it to tip on another episode? Because each
Speaker 1: week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating By running
Speaker 1: all the past episode numbers through a random number generator.
Speaker 1: This week's pick is episode one seventy four that's about
Speaker 1: the novel Frankenstein and fun fact there the teenager Mary
Speaker 1: Shelley was able to write Frankenstein despite being trapped by
Speaker 1: a volcanic winter and surrounded by a five sided love
Speaker 1: triangle which I call a love pentagon because what else
Speaker 1: would you call it? Anyway, I recommend that episode. I
Speaker 1: also recommend my co host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature
Speaker 1: feature about animals, science and more. Our theme music is
Speaker 1: Unbroken Unshaven by the Buddhos Band. Our show logo is
Speaker 1: by artists Bertin durand special thanks to Chris SUSA for
Speaker 1: audio mastering on this episode. Extra extra special thanks go
Speaker 1: to our members and thank you to all our listeners.
Speaker 1: I am thrilled to say we will be back next
Speaker 1: week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that?
Speaker 1: Talk to you then.
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