[RADIOLAB INTRO]

ROBERT KRULWICH: Welcome to the Radiolab podcast. I'm Robert Krulwich. We have a pretty great season of shows coming out in February—an hour on laughter, there's one on deception, a lot more. But for this week's podcast, we wanted to tell you a little bit more about someone we talked to last season on our show on zoos.

DAVID HANCOCKS: Oh.

ROBERT: His name is David Hancocks.

DAVID HANCOCKS: My name is David Hancocks.

ROBERT: He's a zoo director. Kind of frankly a tortured zoo director. You've heard of a tortured artist, you've heard of a tortured poet, this is a tortured zoo director.

DAVID HANCOCKS: [laughs] Yeah.

ROBERT: He wrote a book called A Different Nature: The Paradoxical World of Zoos and Their Uncertain Future. And we talked to him.

DAVID HANCOCKS: I used to dread going out to dinner and people finding out that I was the zoo director. There was always that moment you'd be sitting next to somebody ...

[WOMAN: Oh, what do you do for a living?]

DAVID HANCOCKS: Oh, here we go.

[WOMAN: Really? The zoo? This guy works at the zoo!]

DAVID HANCOCKS: If it was a guy, he maybe had a zoo joke.

[MAN: What do you call a female vocalist at the zoo?]

DAVID HANCOCKS: And you had always heard the jokes before.

[MAN: Elephant's Gerald. Get it? Elephant's Gerald.]

[WOMAN: [laughs]]

DAVID HANCOCKS: So—now which is just fine, except that if you're trying to use zoos to get people to develop a different view of the animal world, you've really got some fairly important and some serious things to say. I mean, zoos, I think they've got this scientific side to them, but there's always this showbiz side as well. And I found that this imagery of zoos is a place where it's like a Sunday afternoon suburban park, hot dogs and, you know, all that sort of paraphernalia, it gets in the way of what I think zoos could and should be about.

ROBERT: Hmm. So let's say we agree with you, then what are—what would a good zoo do to solve your problem?

DAVID HANCOCKS: [laughs]

ROBERT: What would you want? What is a—if you close your eyes and imagine a really, really, really good one, what does it look like? What's it doing?

DAVID HANCOCKS: Well, it doesn't look anything like the sort of updated version of the 1828 London Zoo that we have in so many places today.

ROBERT: Instead, he says, it looks a lot more like the outdoors. And in our show on zoos, he told us about how he took the gorilla cages at the Seattle Zoo, and essentially turned them inside out. He brought the trees in.

DAVID HANCOCKS: Trees. They had streams they could play in, they had grasses they could roll around in. They had bushes they could climb into.

ROBERT: And people had to stand on the outside.

DAVID HANCOCKS: Yeah.

ROBERT: Anyway, this was back in the '70s, and now he wants to take this idea even further: rather than make the zoo look like a natural setting, he wants to move the zoo to a very, very wide open, almost porous place where you can't tell where the zoo begins and where nature goes on kind of on its own. He worked at such a place, and it doesn't use that blasphemous word 'zoo.' They call this place a museum.

DAVID HANCOCKS: The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson. We focused on the natural history of the Sonoran Desert, so we gave as much attention to the plants as to the animals and to paleontology, and tried to show this holistic view of what the Sonoran Desert was. And we put a very large percentage of our attention upon the invertebrates and small lifeforms.

ROBERT: Well, let me see. So by that logic then, because I've been to that Sonoran Desert Zoo, and it's gorgeous. It's up on sort of—it's out of town, a little bit on the edge of town.

DAVID HANCOCKS: Yeah.

ROBERT: It's behind all these saguaro cactuses, it's up on a hill.

DAVID HANCOCKS: Yeah.

ROBERT: And you do feel like you're in an integrated place.

DAVID HANCOCKS: Yes.

ROBERT: So you're asked to pay attention to the plants and to the local animals. And they even bring buzzards out of the sky by putting roadkill down there.

DAVID HANCOCKS: Mm-hmm, that's right.

ROBERT: You get—you even get visited by wild, wild animals.

DAVID HANCOCKS: [laughs] It's true, yes.

ROBERT: But now let's just move this to London, say. How about this: here's your London version of it.

DAVID HANCOCKS: Yeah.

ROBERT: You have the museum with the—the zoo with the lions and the tigers and the alligators and stuff, and now I'm gonna open up the London Zoo, which will have fabulous pigeons, amazing rats, the occasional insect or two.

DAVID HANCOCKS: [laughs]

ROBERT: And maybe how about let's really spice it up: a couple of the nice bulldogs.

DAVID HANCOCKS: [laughs]

ROBERT: So—so how many people are you gonna get to go to that zoo?

DAVID HANCOCKS: Well, I wouldn't hire you to run that zoo, Robert, if you were going to do that.

ROBERT: Maybe not, but he would hire this guy.

DAVID HANCOCKS: There was a man worked for the BBC Natural History Unit, Christopher Parsons. And he was toying with this idea of how can I use all this wonderful imagery that I've got on film, and how can I get people to spend more time looking and thinking and being exposed to nature. Then he stumbled over this revelation where he was going to show—I think it may have been some of the first productions from Life on Earth. And they had a cocktail party at the BBC studios, and he put up three screens, very large screens, and he shaped them as if they were a bay window.

ROBERT: And these screens were hooked up to a video camera that was way out in the wilderness up in the Orkney Islands off Norway and Scotland. And ...

DAVID HANCOCKS: It was live. It was live and it was—and it was set up on a cliff face with lots of seabirds and guillemots and things. So there was lots of activity going on. And he just had it there in the background as part of his little cocktail presentation of launching this new television series. And he found, and what shocked him was that instead of, as people do usually in that sort of situation, milling around and chatting and swapping business cards and all that sort of thing, people were standing in front of this bay window effect, this window onto the world. And he said they weren't just standing there for seconds or for—they were standing there for half an hour just silent.

ROBERT: They were watching live pictures.

DAVID HANCOCKS: Live. Yes.

ROBERT: From hundreds of miles north of where they were.

DAVID HANCOCKS: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: Of nothing in particular, right? Birds flying up, birds flying down.

DAVID HANCOCKS: Yes. And his thought on it was that it was the unknown factor of it that made it so fascinating. It really was this—this window onto a natural scene.

ROBERT: This is one vision Hancocks has for a future zoo. It's kind of a cyber zoo where you can walk around and see in high definition on huge screens images live from the wild. And that guy, Parsons, actually started up such a place. It was in Bristol, England. He called it Wild Walks. But it closed last year.

DAVID HANCOCKS: Christopher Parsons opened the door onto all sorts of new possibilities, none of which have been explored in any way or to any degree within the zoo world.

ROBERT: Why not?

DAVID HANCOCKS: I think it's because most people who work in zoos chose to work in a zoo because they like zoos. You know, they went to zoos when they were a kid, they enjoyed what they saw and experienced there, and they want to perpetuate it. I also know from personal experience that if you go to your zoo board and say, "Why don't we get rid of the elephant and put in a show of some television from elephants in the wild?" you'll get some very strange looks, and they'll probably give you a bus ticket.

ROBERT: Actually, instead of going to a zoo physically, you could always do this at home on your computer. Your computer screen could be a window into the wild world of animals. The internet is littered with all kinds of wildlife cams. There's a really great one—it's a falcon cam on 55 Water Street in Manhattan. On the porch just outside the office on an upper floor, it's like the 15th or 17th floor, the local falcons have established a nest. And every spring, you can see it—the whole world can watch, you can see these baby falcons, you see the eggs, you see them hatch, you see them, you know, fed by their parents. And I don't know how much work gets done in this place on 55 Water Street in Manhattan, but the world can watch the falcons.

ROBERT: And you can do this yourself. You can Google the words "panda cam" or "falcon cam" and see it for yourself. Maybe "antelope cam." I don't know. Or you can come to our website where we've compiled a bunch of our favorites. That's Radiolab.org. That's where we are. Radiolab—one word—dot org. And while you're there, post a comment, send us an email. Let us know if there's something you've heard on one of our programs you want to learn more about. That's it for this week. I'm Robert Krulwich. Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation. Thanks for listening.

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