This chapter discusses the design of zoo enclosures and briefly considers important stages in the history of zoo design. Animals must be safely contained within zoos and the nature of the containment varies between species. From time to time containment methods fail and animals escape, sometimes with fatal consequence for them and the people they encounter. There is an ongoing debate about the appropriate amount of space required for some species, especially large carnivores and other wide-ranging taxa. Minimum space requirements for taxa are arbitrarily determined, and usable space and enclosure shape should be considered when enclosures are designed. A number of studies have examined enclosure use by zoo animals, the need for shade and an appropriate substratum. Visitor behaviour may affect enclosure use in some taxa. Enclosure design is a compromise between the need that animals have to avoid the gaze of the public and the desire of visitors to see the animals.

Pairing David Garnett’s A Man in the Zoo (1924) with Franz Kafka’s ‘A Report to an Academy’ (1917), this chapter demonstrates how both writers troubled species boundaries by drawing on historical shifts in the public display of human and nonhuman beings. The first part explores how Garnett’s story of a man who volunteers to be caged between a chimpanzee and an orang-utan offers an ironic transformation structured around abrupt plot turns and taxonomic confusion. Here Garnett exposes hierarchies of both gender and species and offers glimpses of more ethical creaturely relations. The second half of the chapter brings Kafka’s story of an ape who learns to behave like a human into a critique of animal capture and zoological trade, in particular concerning Carl Hagenbeck’s business. Hagenbeck is subtly alluded to in Garnett’s novella, where the historical phenomenon of animal spectatorship informs his satirical depiction of London’s zoo, even as his treatment of race and human exhibition remains ambivalent. The section brings to light material from Hagenbeck’s own writings and newspaper coverage, alongside literary connections to Samuel Butler, John Collier and Louis MacNeice.