Poor bewildered beasts

If you’ve ever read a history of the early days of the Foundling Hospital, you’ll remember the shock: expecting to enjoy a heartwarming tale of 18th-century babies being rescued from destitution and brought to live in a lovely safe place, you will have found instead that the tale was mostly about babies dying after they arrived.

So it is with this fascinating book about the early days of London Zoo. Expecting to read about lions, tigers and monkeys in all their boisterous aliveness, you wade instead into disturbing descriptions of the illnesses they suffered and their pitiful early deaths. Disembarked from long voyages in the late 1820s, the poor bewildered beasts of Asia and Africa often looked in a terrible state as they lumbered along to the new Zoological Gardens in the north-east corner of Regent’s Park. Once there, many of them didn’t last long. As soon as an animal died, it was pounced on by an anatomist and a taxidermist: to such an extent that Isobel Charman starts using a euphemism for death. ‘On its third day at Bruton Street, the orang-utan became the concern of the Preserving Department.’

The winter of 1828 finished many of them off. No one knew how to treat the animals: did they need more heat, or more ventilation? Both seemed to kill them. Their illnesses were many and various: a leopard with indigestion, a reindeer with cutaneous eruptions, a llama with constipation, a puma with ‘vomition’, a monkey with a lacerated back, and a chimpanzee called Tommy who lost the will to live and died quietly by the fire in his Guernsey shirt. On top of all that, there were the animals with weird mental health problems: kangaroos who self-harmed, and then committed suicide by hurling themselves against the railings.