When Zoos Need a Penguin, They Don't Buy One

In Oklahoma City, the landscape is dominated by oil wells, cotton fields, red dirt, and cattle ranches. But inside the Oklahoma City Zoo, you'll find Indian rhinos, Komodo dragons, western lowland gorillas, Sumatran orangutans, and a venomous beaded lizard from Guatemala that is housed in only a handful of zoos across the country. The zoo's executive director, Dwight Lawson, also keeps plowshare tortoises, which he describes as "probably the most endangered tortoise" on earth. The question is how a zoo in middle America ends up with animals from the far corners of the globe—and the answer has changed dramatically over the past half century.

The Old Way: Capture, Kill, and Trade

For most of zoo history, animals arrived the same way they had for centuries: they were captured in the wild. In the 19th century, a German trader named Carl Hagenbeck built a global business supplying zoos across Europe and America. He charged based on the difficulty of capture—an elephant fetched around $8,000, a hippopotamus $5,000, and a giraffe $1,500. In today's money, those sums reach tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. That financial incentive drew poachers and smugglers, who often killed adult animals to steal their young.