The last menageries

The departure of the elephants from London Zoo will mark a turning-point in the history of animals in captivity.

So. Farewell then, Dilberta, Mya and Layang-Layang. Cultural change is a gradual process, and its meaning only rarely crystallised by a single event, but there can be no doubt that such is the case with London losing its elephants.

They are to go, the great beasts, from London Zoo, where for 170 uninterrupted years they and their predecessors have curled their trunks and swished their tails and dropped their great dollops of dung under the endlessly fascinated gaze of millions of visitors. The Zoological Society of London announced last week that the three remaining elephants on the cramped Regent's Park site are to move to the zoo's sister establishment at Whipsnade in Bedfordshire, which has nearly 20 times as much space. They will not be replaced: once they have left, the Modernist elephant house designed by Sir Hugh Casson in the Sixties, which is now clearly seen as far too small for them, will be the elephant house only in name.

Gone: from the capital city, these capital creatures. What is it about this announcement that draws us up short, catches our attention, even grabs at our feelings in some obscure way? It's only three animals, after all. To try to pin it down, imagine the news was that London Zoo was to lose its aye-ayes (nocturnal lemurs from Madagascar) or its pottos (lemur relations) or even its hyraxes (the elephants' rat-sized closest relatives). Would we notice? If we were not animal enthusiasts to a high degree, would we care? Hardly.

Yet something about the elephants and their final departure from central London surely touches us all. It is not just that we all remember from childhood how Nelly the elephant packed her trunk and said goodbye to the circus, and can easily picture Dilberta, Mya and Layang-Layang saying goodbye to Regent's Park and lumbering off through the vibrant tattiness of Camden Town and the flashy elegance of Hampstead, to crest the hill where the rolling green acres of their new home in the Chilterns may be glimpsed in the sunlit distance...

We can imagine that, if we have anything of the child left in us. But there is something more. And is it not, on reflection, that the great and noble pachyderm, this astonishingly shaped mixture of strength and gentleness that does amazing stuff with its giant nose, is somehow at the heart of what anyone over 40, at least, has always thought a zoo is, or ought to be? A place of wonders, to be gazed at? If you take the elephant out of it, is it really a zoo? "Call yourself a zoo? Where's your elephants, then?"

This is the age-old and traditional version of the zoo, the place where we go to look upon wild beasts and be amazed and stare – the zoo as menagerie. Know something? Its day is done. And the departure of the elephants from the heart of London symbolises and marks its passing, powerfully, incontestably and finally.

We need not get hung up on definitions; the Oxford English Dictionary is perfectly adequate. "Menagerie: a collection of wild animals in captivity for exhibition, etc." It is the exhibition bit that is finished now as a raison d'être for zoos all over the world. (Not to mention the "etc": no more rides on the elephant's back; no more chimps' tea parties.)

In the last 25 years the growth of concern for animal welfare and the rise of the animal rights movement have made people look at traditional zoos for the first time from the animals' point of view, and not like what they have seen. The depression and deviant behaviour of many creatures in close confinement have been recognised. Indeed, an animal welfare case can be made against having zoos at all.

But zoos very much do have a future, because the conservation case in their favour is even stronger, and in a world where extinction is becoming ever more common, we need havens for our endangered species. Yet leading zoos all recognise now that cramped quarters and exploitation are no longer acceptable, and that conservation, not display, must be their rationale; the age of the menagerie is over.

This is a big change. Until very recently menageries and zoos were one and the same thing, and menageries have been with us for thousands of years. Their fascination seems to lie in two profound human emotions: firstly, the desire of great and powerful men to display dominance over great and powerful animals, such as lions and tigers (not to mention elephants); and secondly, the residual awe in all of us in the presence of big wild beasts. The evolutionary origin of that is obvious. This weekend, you can go to Howlett's Zoo near Canterbury and see European bison, or to Marwell Zoo in Hampshire and see wild Przewalski's horses, or Whipsnade and see rhinoceroses. But 35,000 years ago, our ancestors looked so tremblingly on these animals, such was their desire for them and fear of them, that they reverently drew their pictures on the cave walls of Lascaux, and their anxiety still whispers in our tissues.

The capture of the beasts and the keeping of them rather than the eating of them, the menageries themselves, came with kings and queens. Proud monarchs began bestiaries, with the pharaohs of ancient Egypt prominently addicted. Antelopes and similar animals including gazelles, ibexes and oryxes are depicted wearing collars on Egyptian tomb pictures at Saqqara, dating from 2500 BC. Most monarchs followed: Solomon, Ashurbanipal, Nebuchadrezzar, all had their collections, as did the emperors of China and indeed the city states of ancient Greece.

The Romans kept wild animals for something more sinister than display: slaughter in the arena. It was not just a case of lions eating Christians; the beasts themselves were often the victims, and never more spectacularly than under Commodus, the deranged son (vividly played by Joaquin Phoenix in the 2000 movie Gladiator) of the stoic philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon gives us an astonishing snapshot of a man who stood safe on a tower in the arena and shot down every kind of wild beast, specialising in shooting the necks off running ostriches with arrows whose point was shaped into the form of a crescent. In a haunting footnote, Gibbon adds: "Commodus killed a camelopardalis or giraffe, the tallest, the most gentle, and the most useless of the large quadrupeds. This singular animal, a native only of the interior parts of Africa, has not been seen in Europe since the revival of letters; and though M de Buffon (Histoire Naturelle, tom. xiii) has endeavoured to describe, he has not ventured to delineate, the giraffe."

Only the Romans were bloodthirsty enough to be giraffe-killers. Other societies have always valued such creatures for their fascination, and throughout the Middle Ages kings and emperors continued to create their menageries when the animals could be found. In England, William the Conqueror's successors found his stone-built Tower of London the ideal (and probably only suitable) place, and Henry I, who built the lion tower, and later the Plantagenet Henry II, began an animal collection that was to remain in place for 700 years.

Down the centuries, the Royal Menagerie held lions, leopards, rhinos and the first African elephant seen in Britain since the Romans. A polar bear was allowed to exercise in the Thames, swimming on a long lead. Bears were baited in the bear pit, and at one stage in the 18th century, there was a singular admission fee: a visitor could feed their pet dog or cat to the lions in lieu of a charge.

But after the Zoological Society of London was founded in 1826 the Royal Menagerie of the Tower was transferred to Regent's Park to be the nucleus of the society's collection; and when this was opened to the public some 20 years later, the great age of London Zoo began. The increasingly emancipated and mobile Victorians loved London Zoo. It thrived throughout the first three-quarters of the 20th century, and indeed the decade of the 1950s was its absolute heyday in terms of visitors, who flocked in their millions to see Bruno the bear cub and Chi Chi the giant panda. Zoos everywhere then were enjoyed, often beloved places, outdoor galleries of living art, places to take lovers as well as families. Zoos as menageries: great. But nobody ever asked how the animals felt.

It is immensely to London Zoo's credit that it is sacrificing three of its prime public attractions for the sake of their own welfare. There is no doubt that many visitors will be disappointed, and strong criticism has already been voiced, not least by the London-loving commentator Simon Jenkins in his column in the Evening Standard. "Call yourself a zoo? Where's your elephants, then?" was very much his argument this week.

But if we spare a moment to think of Dilberta, Mya and Layang-Layang themselves, it is hard not to imagine that once the narrow and bare concrete walls of the Casson elephant house have been left behind, and tatty Camden and flashy Hampstead have been lumbered through (or trundled through in a lorry), and the smoky capital has vanished into the distance, the rolling green acres of Whipsnade will come as a welcome change. Over indeed, the age of the menagerie. We might regret it; the animals surely won't.

Zoos: A brief history

One of the earliest known zoos was established by Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt in about 1500BC. The ancient Greeks started keeping wild animals during the 7th century BC. In around 500BC they imported peafowl from India. So many people came to view them that, for the first time, an admission fee was charged. And in 280BC Ptolemy II developed the Alexandria zoo into the greatest collection of animals the world had yet known.

Zoos became popular in Europe in the 1400s, when explorers returned with strange creatures from the New World. Over the years larger collections appeared, which were also centres of research.

In 1907, Carl Hagenbeck, a German animal dealer and zoo owner, developed the moat technique of displaying animals, which vastly improved their conditions. Zoos began replacing barred cages with larger, more natural enclosures.

The gardens of the Zoological Society of London were opened to members and their friends in 1828. The general public was admitted from 1847 to boost the society's finances. The word "zoo" did not appear in everyday language until 1867.

The attraction's most famous resident was Jumbo, an African bull elephant who arrived in 1865, and gave the word "jumbo" to the English language. He later became aggressive and unsuitable for giving rides, and in 1882 was sold to Barnum and Bailey's Circus, causing a public outcry. Goldie the eagle hogged the headlines when he escaped from London Zoo for two weeks in 1965, winning a mention in the House of Commons and causing huge traffic jams around Regent's Park as 5,000 people came to see him swooping from tree to tree.

The zoo currently attracts around one million visitors a year.