Lions loose on a gentleman's lawn: animality, authenticity and automobility in the emergence of the English safari park

Abstract

General rightsThis document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/pure/about/ebr-terms 1 Lions loose on a gentleman's lawn: animality, authenticity and automobility in the English safari park Andrew J.P. Flack University of Bristol, Historical Studies, 13-15 Woodland Road, Clifton, Bristol, BS8 1TB, UK Abstract When the English safari park first appeared in the grounds of Longleat House in Wiltshire's rolling countryside in the spring of 1966, it was the first time that visitors to an animal park in Europe were awarded the freedom of the road as they meandered through captive animal spaces in search of eye-to-eye encounters with exotic animals from the comfort of their cars. This kind of park, where the illusions of both wildness and freedom in captivity might be said to be at their most intense, has, however, received almost no attention from scholars, not least in the arena of zoo histories but also in the fields of environmental histories and historical geographies more widely. Moreover, while historians of environment and technology have increasingly considered roads and automobility, they have rarely been examined in relation to wildlife. This article focuses on the earliest years of Europe's first drive-through safari park. It illustrates that these kinds of human-animal geographies reveal much about the ways in which humans, animals and technologies combine and interact with each other in the forging of various hybridities. In so doing it raises important questions about what constitutes authenticity and artificiality. The story of the emergence of the English safari park is, at its heart, a narrative of trouble. In the safari park, and well beyond, spatial categorisations, human and animal natures, and interspecies encounters in captive worlds were disrupted, disputed, and reconfigured.

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“…The idea behind the safari park was first formulated when the first drive-through lion enclosure was established in 1966 in Longleat, England [20]. Worldwide, safari parks showcase African game animals in open spaces and may also have aquaria, arboreta, aviaries, and reptile houses.…”

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“…Demonstrating the maturity of the sub-discipline, research in the field of animal geographies is concerned not only with questions relating to animals and human-animal relations, but also directly engages debates, develops theoretical approaches, and contributes insight to concepts adopted elsewhere in the discipline, including affect and emotion (Collard, 2016; Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2017; Wilcox, 2017), bodies (Morin, 2016; Nelson, 2017), mobilities (Flack, 2016; Hodgetts and Lorimer, 2018), agency (Gorman, 2017; Van Patter and Hovorka, 2018), biopolitics (Bluwstein, 2018; Colombino and Giaccaria, 2016), interdisciplinarity (Magrane and Johnson, 2017; Pooley et al, 2017), the Anthropocene (Houston et al, 2018; McGregor and Houston, 2018), and encounter (Collard, 2016; Wilson, 2017). In addition to its animal geographies progress reports, this journal has recently published papers that explicitly seek to develop theoretical approaches for animal geographies (Hodgetts and Lorimer, 2018; Lorimer et al, 2019).…”