Colin Tudge is a former member of the Council of London Zoo. The Variety of Life is published by Oxford.
In his parks in 16th-century India, Akbar the Great employed personal doctors to look after his tigers, cheetahs, deer and five thousand elephants, and invited the populace at large to visit the animals: ‘Meet your brothers, take them to your hearts and respect them.’ But as David Hancocks colourfully describes, most precursors of the modern zoo have been the opposite of this,...
They are pollarding the plane trees in our street. They do it every few years: left to themselves, branches would overtop the houses by many metres and form a summer tunnel of green. In other...
Humanity is fissile: everywhere it goes, it forms clans, Yoruba and Yanomamo, Mods and Rockers; so powerful is the urge to diverge, even shared ethnicity is optional. No wonder humanity is so...
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