The Hidden Meadows Garden Club decided to take advantage of the San Diego Zoo Safari Park’s program of making admission free for Seniors in February. Timing of the trip could not have been better because the San Pasqual Valley facility was in all its glory yesterday, starting with a cool morning that got progressively warmer as the day went on. I am hesitant to name the attendees since, by definition, that puts them all in Seniors category, but that may not be so shocking to some, given the nature of the favored retirement pastime of gardening. Attending were fourteen of us.
We got a jump on the day by being the first in line for the 9:00am opening and started by heading up towards the Bonsai Garden to view the magnificent array of 50-400 year-old specimen trees that put all of our feeble bonsai efforts to shame. We then headed up past the kangaroos to the Succulent and Baja Gardens. We stopped to ponder the Bighorn Sheep through the Condor Ridge, where California’s grand birds hang out near the Bald Eagles and other native California birds of prey. We were heading down the hill onto the Tiger Trail when we saw a magnificent Bengal Tiger and soon thereafter a pride of lionesses looking hungry for their lunch. The Safari Park is planning its grand opening of its new Elephant Enclosure (the Denny Sanford Elephant Valley) in a few weeks and as we headed past it we could see that it promises to be well worth another visit in the near future.
Our plan was to honor our origins as a Garden Club by taking the Noon Botanical Tram ride through the Escondido version of the African Savana. Our group boarded the tram and spent 30 minutes getting educated about how the Zoo has used all available plant matter to match the needs of the transplanted fauna as well as the modest available water supply. It’s hard to say we learned a lot about our local succulents and native California plants that we didn’t already know, but that was never really the point. Being reminded of what a great facility we have at our disposal in our local San Diego Zoo Safari Park was the point and we were not disappointed. Most of us were done in and had exceeded our daily step budget, so we wandered towards the parking lot choosing to skip the Gorilla Enclosure before heading home.
We have, over the years, been to both the Zoo and the Safari Park many times, but it never fails to impress us. When you ask people what do they know about San Diego, most of them will mention the Zoo in the first few minutes. Given the fact that most cities around the world have some version of a zoo, they have a surprisingly ancient history, though what they looked like and why they existed has changed dramatically over time. The earliest known animal collections date back to around 3500 BC in Egypt, where rulers kept hippos, elephants, baboons, and wildcats as symbols of power and divine favor. Similar “menageries” appeared in ancient China. Emperor Wen Wang of the Zhou dynasty maintained what he called a “Garden of Intelligence” around 1000 BC. In Mesopotamia, Assyrian kings collected exotic animals as trophies of conquest. These weren’t public institutions; they were private demonstrations of wealth and dominion. The Greeks and Romans continued the tradition. Aristotle kept animals for scientific study, influencing Alexander the Great to send exotic specimens back from his conquests. Rome went further, maintaining vast collections of animals that were ultimately fed into the spectacles of the Colosseum, a grim intersection of natural history and entertainment.
After Rome’s fall, royal menageries persisted through the medieval period in Europe. The Tower of London famously housed lions, polar bears, and even an elephant. Starting in the 13th century, gifts were exchanged between monarchs as diplomatic gestures. Versailles had an elaborate menagerie by the 1660s under Louis XIV. These zoos remained exclusively aristocratic privileges. The pivotal shift came with the Enlightenment. The idea emerged that animal collections should serve scientific and public education rather than royal prestige. The Vienna Tiergarten Schönbrunn, founded in 1752, is considered the oldest continuously operating zoo, originally built for the Habsburg imperial family and opened to the public in 1765. London Zoo opened in Regent’s Park in 1828, explicitly founded by the Zoological Society of London for scientific study, and admitted the general public by 1847. The 19th century saw a zoo-building boom across cities as expressions of civic pride and scientific modernity. Paris had the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes. Philadelphia opened the first American zoo in 1874, followed quickly by Cincinnati, Chicago, and New York. These institutions were deeply tied to the imperial era. Exotic animals from colonized territories flowed into European and American cities, and shamefully, some zoos even exhibited indigenous people alongside animals in so-called “human zoos,” a practice that persisted into the early 20th century.
The design philosophy of zoos evolved considerably. Early zoos used iron bars and small cages. Carl Hagenbeck, a German animal dealer, revolutionized this around 1907 with his Tierpark in Hamburg, using moats and naturalistic landscapes instead of cages, an approach that eventually became standard worldwide. Throughout the 20th century, zoos faced increasing scrutiny over animal welfare and the ethics of captivity. In some ways, its amazing to realize that human captivity rights just barely predated animal captivity rights. Nonetheless, this pushed zoological institutions to redefine their mission around conservation, breeding programs for endangered species, and wildlife education. The modern zoo positions itself as an ark against extinction, participating in species survival plans and funding field conservation. Whether that fully justifies captivity remains a genuine ethical debate, but it represents a profound transformation from the royal menageries of antiquity. Today there are roughly 800 accredited zoos worldwide, visited by about 700 million people annually, making them among the most visited cultural institutions on earth.
The San Diego Zoo has one of the more interesting origin stories in zoo history since it essentially grew out of an accident. When the 1915-1916 Panama-California Exposition was held in Balboa Park to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal, the organizers brought in exotic animals as part of the exhibits. When the exposition ended, no one quite knew what to do with them. A local physician and passionate animal enthusiast named Harry Wegeforth heard the lions roaring as he drove past and reportedly turned to his brother and said, “Wouldn’t it be splendid if San Diego had a zoo?” He meant it literally. In 1916, he founded the Zoological Society of San Diego and convinced the city to let him take custody of the leftover exposition animals. Wegeforth was a remarkably aggressive collector and entrepreneur. He traded, bartered, and hustled animals from around the world, sometimes exchanging rattlesnakes and California fauna that were exotic to other countries for animals he wanted. He built the zoo from almost nothing through sheer force of personality, and it grew rapidly through the 1920s and 1930s.
The zoo was situated in Balboa Park, which gave it a generous amount of space compared to many urban zoos of the era. This proved enormously important for its later development. San Diego’s mild Mediterranean climate was another major advantage, allowing the zoo to keep a wider variety of species comfortably outdoors year-round. One of the zoo’s most significant early innovations was its approach to naturalistic habitats. Under the influence of Wegeforth and later directors, San Diego moved away from the cage-dominated model faster than most American zoos, embracing open enclosures with plants, rocks, and moats. By mid-century it had developed a reputation for lush, almost botanical garden-like environments. The zoo became famous for its extensive plant collection alongside its animals, eventually housing one of the largest collections of subtropical plants in the world (hence the interest of our Garden Club).
In 1969, San Diego made a decision that would define its modern identity: it opened the San Diego Wild Animal Park (now called the Safari Park) here in Escondido, about 35 miles north of the main Zoo in Balboa Park. The concept was radical for American zoos at the time, a vast 1,800-acre preserve where animals, particularly large African and Asian species, could roam in herds across open savanna-like terrain. Visitors moved through the animals’ space rather than the other way around. It was explicitly modeled on the idea of a wildlife reserve rather than a traditional zoo, and it gave the institution room to maintain breeding herds of endangered species at a scale impossible in an urban zoo. That conservation breeding emphasis became the San Diego Zoo’s calling card. It developed one of the most successful captive breeding programs in the world, contributing to the recovery of species like the California condor.
The institution today, now officially called San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, operates the original Balboa Park zoo, the Safari Park, and a network of conservation programs across multiple continents. It’s consistently ranked among the best zoos in the world and draws around 4 million visitors annually between its two main facilities. Its arc from a scrappy collection of leftover exposition animals to a globally significant conservation organization is a remarkable institutional story and we are thrilled to have it so close.