In 1904 the Louisiana Purchase Exposition was host to a huge number of innovations, wonders and thrills. Some of the new products unveiled at the show included peanut butter (rediscovered in the late nineteenth-century after originally being invented by Incans), iced tea, the waffle ice-cream cone, the hot dog, the hamburger, and fairy floss (cotton candy). Unfortunately the Louisiana Purchase Exposition is not remembered solely for these contributions to the American culture (and quite possibly the current obesity epidemic), as it was also the venue for a frighteningly common sight throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - the human zoo.

As western influences spread into the farthest corners of the globe, so too did the desire to prove that the ‘White man’ was the most superior form of the human species. In the 1870s there were human zoos all over Europe and in New York. These zoos exhibited to the fascinated public the newly discovered ‘breeds’ of human-beings from places such as the Philippines, Samoa, Lapland, Papua New Guinea, South America, and in some cases the United States itself (the public were fascinated by the Native American Indians). In 1878 and 1889, the Parisian World’s Fair had a ‘Negro Village’ which held four hundred people in zoo-like conditions for 28 million paying spectators to gawk at. The twentieth century continued the trend - exhibitions in 1906, 1907, 1922 and 1931 displayed humans held in cages, often in enforced nudity. In 1906, the Bronx Zoo in New York City placed people from Papua New Guinea (from the Pygmy tribe) on display in the Primates section in enclosures next to apes and chimpanzees.

In 2007 the Adelaide Zoo in South Australia ran a Human Zoo exhibition using volunteers who would be put into enclosures during the day and allowed out at night time. Far from having the original intent of the human zoos, the Adelaide Zoo exhibition was a psychological experiment and a process of social education for the masses who filed past the humans’ enclosure. The public were asked to give donations that would be put towards a new enclosure for the apes, and the experiment was by most accounts a resounding success.

As we discover more about our links to our primate relatives and we begin to understand their level of intelligence and perceptions, you have to wonder if we are submitting these fine creatures to the same injustice which was imposed on hundreds of humans not so long ago.  With extinction an increasing problem and the failure to successfuly breed in captivity a constant concern, should we start thinking of our primate friends as something more than zoo enclosures to visit on a sunny Sunday afternoon?