(tranquil ambient music) - [Steve] When the Denver Zoo first started it was like many zoos in the country, it really was just a random collection of steel cages that animals were displayed in.

- [Thomas] When the Denver zoo was first established, it's really a place to stick a bear in the corner of city park.

- [Brian] As we move through time and we learn more of the exhibits representing wildlife and a much more natural way and it made you feel like you were there with them and understand their habitats.

When you walk into the Denver zoo, it's like you stepped into another world and that's through the exhibitry, that's through the messaging, that's through the animals that you see.

And people really connect with something that they experience, that's the opportunity we have.

- [George] Nothing is Static, it continues to move and evolve politically, culturally, economically, scientifically.

- [Brian] We can continue to move the needle on care and continue to move the needle on conservation of wildlife - [George] Through good times and bad, the zoo is focused on being better for animals and for the community.

They left us that legacy, oftentimes in magnificent buildings like Bear Mountain.

And I hope we're leaving a legacy for the future in places like Predator Ridge and Toyota Elephant Passage.

And I look forward to everyone else who gets to be a part of it in the future.

(tranquil ambient music) - [Male Narrator] This program was made possible by the History Colorado State Historical Fund.

- [Female Narrator] Supporting projects throughout the state to preserve, protect and interpret Colorado's architectural and archeological treasures.

History Colorado State Historical Fund, create the future, honor the past.

- [Male Narrator] With additional funding provided in memory of Deanna E. La Camera by Hassel and Marianne Ledbetter.

And by members like you, thank you.

With special thanks to the Denver Public Library, History Colorado and the Colorado office of film, television, and media.

(tranquil ambient music) - [Thomas] I think the definition of a zoo has always been up for grabs, we see that across history really.

- [Goerge] I think that humans long for a relationship with the wild and wild animals (background chattering) and zoos provide that context to explore that relationship and advance that relationship.

That means that zoos have changed and have needed to change throughout course of history to keep up with those expectations in that relationship.

- [Steve] Zoo practice are really much like the animals in that they are almost living breathing things that evolve over time.

- [Thomas] If you look at zoos, including Denver's, across time, they tell us about how human ideas about nature and about wild animals in particular have changed over time.

- [Female Narrator] The precursors to modern zoos can be traced back to antiquity when it was common for rulers across the world to have menageries.

- Having captive animals from other parts of the empire sort of solidified and embodied and represented the power of the ruler of the empire.

The 1700s, menageries expanded and we're no longer just for monarchs.

This is sort of the beginnings of common people in places like colonial North America encountering traveling shows.

- [Bert] The fascination with animals was huge.

And so traveling menagerie of animals went around the United States with stuff from all over the world.

- [Thomas] But this was a chance to see something new, to learn something about the world, but often to do it in a fashion where entertainment was the expectation.

I think zoos have always occupied a space of the boundaries of entertainment and education.

The way that the animals were displayed was very confining by modern standards quite inhumane, and really shaped how audiences interacted with the animals in pretty particular ways, because a lot of times what this consists of with walking up to the bars and poking through them, having that kind of close, but also very confined and limited contact.

The zoo that many historians will point to as sort of the first recognizable zoo is the London Zoological Park, which opens in the 1820s.

- In the late 1800s, many urban areas in Europe, zoos were becoming more and more popular, urbanization was really ramping up and people were starting to become more separate from wild spaces and wild animals.

- They generally call themselves "zoological gardens" and they're dedicated toward education.

And so the animals were organized taxonomically, the idea was that these were discrete species, the species were on display.

These were really for sort of (speaks foreign language), a middle, upper middle-class audience.

There were for edification and so people who wanted to poke the bears or see the lions fight knew not to come to the zoo, they would go to other animal entertainments of the period, even though that boundary was never quite so clear as the heads of zoos wanted them to be.

The first zoos in the United States that are recognizable as such were essentially kind of built on the London and on the broader European model.

- Many of them started as municipal zoos, started as city zoos and some zoos actually were a refuge for animals that had ended up in someone's house or hit by a car, but they weren't killed and they needed a place to hold these animals and the city park kind of environments in many cases became those spots.

- The legend of how the zoo started is that a railroad man in Carbondale, outside of Aspen came across a bear cub and he and his wife tried keeping the bear cub at their home, which many Coloradans at the time did, having captive animals was fairly common.

But the bear cub got pretty ornery, trashed their house and the railroad man decided to send the cub to the city of Denver as a gift to the mayor.

- [Steve] Billy Bryant was given to mayor McMurry in 1896.

There's a legend that he was named that after William Jennings Bryan who ran for US president.

- On receiving the cub, the mayor presumably didn't know what to do with it.

But City Park was well underway at that point and it seemed like a good place to send the cub.

- Other legend about him but one that appears to actually have some fact behind it is that Billy was initially first just housed in some sheds.

One Christmas, the parks superintendent went out to the chicken shed to get the Christmas Turkey only to discover that all of the birds had been eaten already and it turned out Billy was the culprit.

So the superintendent decided that Billy needed a permanent home, took him over by the duck lake, had a steel cage constructed that was Billy's home.

And that really for better or worse cemented the location of the Denver Zoo in City Park.

(tranquil ambient music) - [Second Female Narrator] The first few years, the zoo's growth relied on the tenacity of City Park's superintendent, John C. Gallop and the zoo's first lead animal keeper Alford Hill.

With just a small staff and a large vision, the zoo began to expand from its humble beginnings.

- The early versions of the zoo were very simple iterations of cage work or fences.

It was for while a very simple execution.

- In 1898, William Fisher, who was at the time a young architect and one of the true upcoming stars of the Denver architectural world designed a series of maintenance barns for the zoo.

- [George] The old barn and the barn complex, it was intended to house some animals, as well as some of the operational infrastructure, carriages, carts, horses and other things like that that were fundamental to the zoo operation.

- Built out of brick and the neo-colonial style.

- [George] Very handsome buildings that would say, you know detailed brick work, they weren't just utilitarian.

- [Thomas] The collection was built up from local captive animals.

It was common for people who'd captured a bird of prey or a predator and other parts of Colorado to write to the Denver Zoo and to offer to sell that creature to the zoo and the zoo sometimes accepted.

- [George] Denver Zoo starting with local animals is probably a combination of the accessibility of those, but also the attraction of those animals.

So people coming to the edge of the frontier to the front range, to the edge of the mountains and it's these animals, bison, elk, deer, bear, coyote, wolf that were fundamentally, you know the stories, the legends and really what people were interested in initially.

- [Second Female Narrator] This local connection kickstarted the zoo's first conservation project saving the American bison.

By the 1880s, there were only about 300 bison left to roam North America, from over 30 million to 300.

The near extinction of these animals, so sacred and vital to native American tribes across the United States was an order to clear land for white settlers.

The Denver Zoo was one of the first in the nation to focus conservation efforts on bison, and their success can be seen today (tranquil ambient music) in the Genesee herd.

Other local animals became celebrity ambassadors for their species, Blackjack rescued and brought to the zoo as a cub was a favorite.

Tales of his feuds, loves, and triumphs over rivals would draw crowds to the caged line park.

- [Steve] In fact, the zoo not only was completely open with no surrounding fence, but you could drive your car up to a cage and get out and take a look at animals.

- [Thomas] There is fairly broad acceptance, the caging wild animals was just fine.

You know, cages were kind of a mixed blessing there, cages could provide that, that separation between audiences and animals.

Kept audiences safe, there was also considerable danger to the animals posed by the public, which is actually still a problem in zoos.

Throwing change for instance, zoos have to regulate not only the animals but also the people and in a lot of ways, the people are actually harder to control than the creatures behind bars.

- But that wasn't necessarily the best for the animal itself.

That didn't provide a very enriching environment, it was a very bland environment.

- [Thomas] Initially then the Denver Zoo was not particularly easy to distinguish from amusement parks, places like Ilitches or Manhattan Beach Amusement Park.

And so, you know, we see all of these kinds of uncertainties and shifts about what is he really is.

- [Second Female Narrator] Circuses, amusement parks and zoos, all exploited curiosities for their audiences, even human ones, freak shows at some, human zoos at others.

Popularized by German wild animal trader and trainer, Carl Hagenbeck.

This exploitation trend went global.

- [Thomas] So Hagenbeck was one of the many folks involved in animal entertainment that drew different boundaries than most of us do today between between humanity and the animal kingdom.

In the late 1800s he had what he called people exhibits.

- [Second Female Narrator] Hagenbeck's ethnographic exhibits displayed people from all over the globe, from the Saami people of Northern Europe to the Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka.

(intense ambient music) The city of Denver provided no exception to this curiosity.

In 1900, the city brought members of the Hickory Apache nation to City Park for nine days where the zoo served as a backdrop for their encampment.

- But Hagenbeck is remembered today, mostly in the zoo world as a revolutionary.

(tranquil ambient music) Hagenbeck dispense with that old Victorian notion of the zoo as a series of caged enclosures organized taxonomically.

His intention was to display animals in a new fashion.

This was to some extent about merchandising, every animal in Hagenbeck's habitat, zoo, was actually for sale.

And he implements this idea in his Hamburg Park in the early 1900s.

And it was incredibly ingenious.

- Hagenbeck's habitat zoo essentially started to take away the bars and the barriers at least visually, and then create a natural setting for groupings of animals.

- Granted, they were all charismatic megafauna often from different types of ecosystems, even different continents, but to see them all in a single view from a single place.

- [George] Very stunning.

- This relied on a series of moats that kept the animals separated from each other while lending the viewer the illusion that the animals were all sharing a common habitat.

All of the houses for the animals, all of the kind of service areas were also hidden.

This would be wildly influential, zoos around the world were inspired to change their ways by Hagenbeck's habitat zoo.

To the greatest influence that this would have on the Denver Zoo is really in the Bear Mountain area.

- [Second Female Narrator] What would become one of the most iconic features of the Denver Zoo, Bear Mountain was just a piece of a larger plan, one that had many iterations and took years to initiate - Early on the zoo just really grew haphazardly and it became apparent that there really needed to be a master plan.

In 1912, the zoo hired a head animal keeper whose name was Victor Hugo Boicherdt.

He was extremely knowledgeable about the natural environment and really brought, I think a new level of understanding of that to the zoo.

And he was able to work with an extremely talented landscape architect named Sakoda Debore who drew these ideas and brought them to life at least on paper.

And it looked like finally the zoo had a plan to take it into the future, they just needed the political will to move forward.

And unfortunately, neither one of them possess that power.

It really wasn't until mayor Speer came back for a second term in 1916 that they finally had a champion in city hall.

In 1916, mayor Speer gave a very important speech, entitled "Give While You Live".

During this speech, he put forth the idea that the influential citizens of Denver should really give while they were still alive to build the important civic features that we needed to make Denver a great city, parks, parkways and that included the zoo.

One of the outcomes was that they finally had money to build what was to become one of the most significant enclosures in the zoo to this day, Bear Mountain.

- Victor Boicherdt was directly inspired by Hagenbeck.

The idea was again to kind of create the illusion of naturalness and Boicherdt went to tremendous lengths.

- The construction was overseen by Sako Devora.

It was a complicated process, they literally went out to the cliffs of Dinosaur Ridge out by Morrison and made plaster casts of actual Colorado Rocky Mountain rocks.

These casts were then brought down by caravan down to the town where they were carted to the zoo by truck, and then reassembled.

- It was revolutionary at the time to literally create in place plaster castings that then could be placed as formwork on structural steel to create essentially in this case real rock formations that then can be executed remotely.

- [Thomas] He also used the idea of moats so that the separation between the audience and the animal was no longer bars, but again, for the most part kept both people and animals safe at the zoo.

- [Second Female Narrator] The use of moats, layering and naturalistic elements, all reflect Hagenbeck's influential habitat zoo concept.

His legacy of ethnological expositions is also seen in the southern tip of Bear Mountain which was built to resemble an Aztec ruin and hows monkeys.

However, the Denver Zoo did not completely implement Hagenbeck's vision.

- It was a naturalistic habitat for bears, but there was no real attempt to present a sort of broader illusion with multiple species or that kind of panoramic view of an entire ecosystem.

It was instead of more of discrete part of the Colorado countryside brought into Denver for one species.

And this was right off of 23rd Avenue, and you could actually drive right up to it until 1959.

- This turned out to be more challenging than originally expected for two reasons, one was not only the complexity of the construction but they started in 1917, right at the onset of the US's involvement in World War One.

That resulted in both materials and labor being harder to come by and the cost significantly exceeded the original estimates.

Although all of that seemed to be forgiven the day it was unveiled.

- [Thomas] Bear Mountain was completed in 1918.

- [George] There was tremendous applause.

People just loved this natural habitat and loved seeing the bears in this habitat.

Essentially the real Rocky Mountain in City Park.

It looked like the zoo was finally on its way to becoming the world-class zoo that Denver really wanted.

But tragically, a earlier pandemic was to take the life of mayor Speer in 1918.

Really once again, causing the zoo's finances to dry up and for progress at the zoo to come to a halt.

- [Second Female Narrator] In the end, the full phase plan for the Denver zoo never came to life.

- One of the beautiful things about the zoo, at least from a planner and a designer standpoint, is that it's a consistent reiteration in and all of our plans in some ways never really come to fruition the way you draw them because nothing is static.

Our plans really are frameworks in which to aspire to.

- After mayor Speer passed away, a number of other factors really stopped the progress of the zoo.

We of course, had World War One followed by the depression and then World War Two.

With the country focused on those global crises, the zoo really did not have the resources to make any improvements or to move forward until World War Two.

- [Thomas] There's a feedback loop there and without the money to create the exhibits to draw the visitors, the zoo couldn't raise the money it needed to expand.

- But what you have to know about this profession and the field is no one works here just for the paycheck, we work here because of the passion.

- The Denver zoo has always had incredibly dedicated staff and during this tough period between World War One and World War Two, the head zookeeper, Clyde Hill literally created a victory garden, took to growing the vegetables himself in his backyard that would be used to feed the animals to keep them alive in a time of food shortages.

To think about the time when the world was so all over the place, we had wars happening, to think about that, that inspiration and that motivation and that commitment to wildlife is just is really special.

- Clyde Hill, became one of the longest standing zoo directors, and I think carried a lot of the things that Alfred Hill is that his father had had started and believed in in the early days and carried them through the mid century.

- [Second Female Narrator] While this era brought little growth, the zoo did find some expansion through the works progress administration, which constructed Monkey Island.

The monkeys previous exhibit hadn't been successful in actually keeping the animals in.

This newly vacant corner would become the home of a nearly blind polar bear left behind by a traveling circus.

Vlocks would become a beloved icon of the Denver Zoo for decades.

- In 1947, after World War Two, a young brash 35 year old came into mayoral power in Denver, mayor, Quigg Newton.

He brought incredible energy, enthusiasm and really had a long list of things he wanted to accomplish while he was mayor.

The zoo was on that list.

- Many of Denver civic leaders were kind of embarrassed by the condition of the zoo, they wanted Denver to be, if not a world-class city, at least to kind of top tier US city and zoos were one of the places where cities kind of duked it out for superiority.

They were among the cultural institutions that really mattered.

And so for Denver's civic leaders, the zoo was a real concern.

- The zoo was under the responsibility of the Parks Department, and the Parks Department did as best as they could but with so many different priorities in the city, it seemed like the zoo always was falling to the bottom of the list to invest in.

And the zoo really just could not get the support or the political traction that it needed to be a successful institution.

Mayor Newton ultimately was responsible for the creation of the Denver Zoological Foundation.

And that's the organization that I think finally gave the zoo the resources that it needed to grow to be a great zoo.

Arthur and Helen Johnson were tasked with really leading that effort.

They ended up being exactly the right people at exactly the right time.

They had incredible energy, incredible resources and they were able to get to the movers and shakers of Denver to really spearhead the next 20 years of growth at the zoo.

- [Second Female Narrator] In 1950, one of the foundation's first fundraising efforts was to buy an elephant, Cookie, but once they had cookie in Denver, there was no place to properly show her off.

So she lived in the pump house for nearly a decade until more money could be raised to build a pachyderm house.

The zoo clearly needed a sustainable source of funding, so in 1959, the Denver Zoo charged its first admission.

- It was decided that adults would be charged 50 cents, children would be free and there would be seven free days a year for people who could not afford to get into the zoo.

And they also developed a concessions program where a private contractor was brought in to run food services as well as gift shops with the proceeds from the sale of those going to zoo operations.

- [Second Female Narrator] Simultaneously the foundation looked to advance the campus through a new master plan.

- The zoo went to McFadden and architectural firm out of Waukegan, Illinois that actually had some zoo design background, which at the time was a little bit unique and the desire for this new organization and this new board to really have a roadmap of where to go and some excitement for the community and the ability to raise money, this plan was critical in putting that on the map and starting to advance it.

- The zoo was able to build new facilities for the animal population that utilized the latest in zoo thinking at the time, for example the giraffe pavilion had an overhead feeding system that was really revolutionary at the time.

These buildings used the latest sanitary materials, chrome, tile, materials like that.

And on top of it, they were really beautiful pieces of modern architecture and they left this great legacy of modern design.

- The pachyderm house, it was a great expression of using cast-in-place and in some cases, precast concrete to cover, hide and transform the physical structures into more naturalistic landscapes.

Felines is a beautiful mid-century modern complex and it started to express the thinking at the time for the best care for the animals and the best way to display for the guests.

A master plan is intended to point in a direction.

More importantly, it's something that starts a conversation.

Conversations with our city leaders, conversations with the community.

What do they care about?

What do they want, what do they need, conversations in our zoologic community and what is a better zoo.

- [Second Female Narrator] With the rise of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s, conservationists and animal rights activists were beginning to heavily critique zoos over their purpose.

It was also evident that wild animal populations were in decline from human activities.

- So zoos went into the conservation mission full on and by the 1970s, 1980s, that was really sort of the main way that they tied together all of the different things they were doing whether it was a veterinary care, captive breeding programs, reintroduction programs, to the extent that they were involved in those.

- [Second Female Narrator] In 1981, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums developed the species survival plan program where member institutions collaborated to save the most vulnerable species and maximize genetic diversity in breeding programs.

- Blackfooted ferrets where zoo saved those, California Condors, zoo saved those.

So we really started to actually get involved in not just connecting people but working ourselves to help save wildlife.

And that has flourished since that time.

- [Second Female Narrator] The Denver Zoo began to invest in conservation around the world, the zoo's first field program and it's longest running was established in 1990 in Mongolia.

In Denver charismatic characters like Klondike and Snow became icons for conservation and drew massive audiences to the zoo.

In fact, the siblings doubled the Denver Zoo's attendance in the 90s through successful marketing.

Abandoned by their mother, the Denver Zoo favorites were poster bears for how far the zoo had come in it's animal care programs.

They were the first polar bear cubs to be hand-raised in a zoo in over a decade.

- [Bert] Researchers hardly ever see a baby polar bear.

Their first opportunity to see them is when they come out of the cave and at that that point there about five months of age.

We had Klondike and Snow in the hospital when they were only a few hours of age so.

- Really?

- [Bert] We've been able to contribute some information to people that study polar bears for a living, that they would never have the opportunity to have gotten otherwise.

- [Second Female Narrator] This work could not have been done without the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District.

In 1988, the SCFD was formed to provide funding to Denver significant cultural and scientific institutions, which were struggling at the time due to serious economic downturn.

Attacks of one penny from every $10 purchase would go to these facilities indefinitely.

- And as you come up against financial challenges and crisises as we have with COVID, those dollars are often a safety net to keep you going and to keep you sustainable.

- Zoos have particular financial challenges The care and feeding of exotic animals is a very expensive proposition.

- I think that helped to ease the constant fundraising pressure and also provided revenue streams for things that are hard to raise money for.

- [Steve] Finally, the zoo had a reliable source of funding.

- [Bert] That investment by the people of Colorado allowed us to reinvest in our community to allow for access, to allow for a great facilities, to allow us to deliver education programs in meaningful ways throughout our areas.

- [Second Female Narrator] Secure funding also allowed zoos to develop exhibits that they'd already begun to re-imagine.

The environmental movement had pushed many zoos to discover new ways to inspire visitors into conservation action.

In the 1970s, a new kind of exhibition would transform the zoo experience.

- One of the sort of key innovators is a guy named David Hancock's, closely associated with the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle.

And so Hancock's pioneered an idea called "immersive exhibitry", it's zoos.

And in a lot of ways, this was a throwback to Hagenbeck's idea.

The notion was to provide larger, more naturalistic habitats.

There was more emphasis now on the way that visitors would move through an exhibit and the way that visitors would move through the zoo as a whole.

- The exhibitry is situated in such a way that it is working with the natural history of that animal and the natural behaviors of that animal in the best possible way.

- Another key part of this immersive exhibitry was a fuller move away from kind of the taxonomic vision that it endured in zoos despite Hagenbeck's effort.

And so in immersive exhibitry tried to emphasize relationships.

- [Second Female Narrator] Visitors were given a much more holistic understanding of conservation, and the immersive experience left a more profound impact.

Primate Panorama was Denver zoo's first expression of landscape immersion and opened in 1996.

- [George] Primate Panorama was one of the best and one of the first of its kind in the country.

When you walk into it, you almost forget you're in Denver.

That in fact is the point.

Clayton Freiheit, our longest serving zoo director was just a real proponent of that.

- [Second Female Narrator] Clayton Freiheit arrived at the Denver zoo in 1970 and would lead the institution for 37 years.

- Clayton Freiheit came to Denver as kind of a wonder kin in the zoo world.

He had become the curator, which was basically equivalent to the director of the Buffalo Zoo when he was only 22.

He showed up in Denver several years later with a very, very big reputation for such a young guy.

- He was I think an interesting mix of of old school and new school and I think that's what made him very important in our history.

- He was a guy who loved animals and a guy who knew animals front and back.

And he had that hands-on knowledge, he had that experience in the enclosures but unlike most of the sort of older generation of zoo people, Freiheit was also very magnanimous, he was very comfortable with donors.

He was a very engaging person and so he had kind of that perfect mix then of skills needed to to really revive the zoo and turn it into a major institute.

- [George] Ultimately, things like Predator Ridge and Toyota Elephant Passage essentially were legacies of of his progression of thought and leadership for the zoo.

- [Second Female Narrator] Benson Predator Ridge opened in 2004 and was a groundbreaking exhibit.

- Predator Ridge is really foundational in modern and contemporary zoo design.

The concept is multiple places that animals actually can be exhibited throughout the day at any given time throughout the year.

And so there's an orchestration essentially naturally or managed of animals moving and being seen from different positions and being in new spaces.

Certainly for a 100 years, zoos essentially existed as an animal habitat with a barn and people.

People came in, animal went out into the yard, people saw them, rinse and repeat, do that tomorrow do that for a 100 years.

That's what essentially is the backbone of the zoo.

Predator Ridge completely blew that up and said, I'm not going to have one animal habitat, I'm gonna have many.

And my building is going to be able to move them dynamically into different spaces and the people are going to start to engage that edge in new ways, with new views and new experiences.

And it's not just rinse and repeat, tomorrow it will be different, as a matter of fact, after lunch it will be different.

- We've got three different social groups of animals, so wild dogs, hyenas and lions, they're all social carnivores.

So they live in groups, they hunt in groups, they all naturally occur in the same space.

Predator Ridge made it that all animals, all different animals could go on those.

Now they don't go in at the same time obviously because they don't get along, (Lion roaring) but what it created is as a much more dynamic environment because, one it's not predictable, they don't know exactly where they're gonna go every day, and if you think about a wild animal, their day is not predictable.

That was huge to think about like, hey, instead of just this one yard, I've got three yards, I've got 30 different setups in the back that I might be experiencing as an animal.

(background chattering) - It took years to actually get into an operational rhythm literally because there were so many opportunities, so many different ways to activate it, to operate it and understand what ones were the best for the current residents of the exhibit.

- But you could come in this morning for instance and see lions in the main yard and you might see wild dogs there in the afternoon, but at least daily they're in different exhibits.

So it's complicated, but it's great for the animals, it's worth every minute of it.

(machine screaming) - So inside we have our family pride, we have seven lions in this group.

Right here, we have two of our adult females, Subhi and Elia, and then over here, we have five others.

We have our other adult female, Camara, our adult male Tobias, and then we have three Cubs Tattoo, Oscar and Aralli.

The animals have access at night to the yards and then we bring them inside in the mornings so that we can open up the yard, clean it and then we'll rotate them to a different yard.

So these guys were in a different yard last night and there'll be going to a new yard this morning.

(chains rattling) - You're going into the open?

- Yeah.

(cable grazing pulley) (metal clanging) - It's a true commitment to animal care and wellbeing inside of exhibitry and a real commitment to elevating the guest experience and interface.

But it's an important commitment, that's the commitment we should be making.

Predator Ridge was the recipient of the ACA Top Honors Award and it certainly deserved it.

I think a better testament is that it gets visited by other institutions and other leaders in our industry constantly.

- And so it's been copied a lot, including by ourselves.

Toyota Elephant Passage is what I call Predator Ridge on steroids, we took that same concept and applied it to elephants and rhinos, and it's been huge.

- [George] Toyota Elephant Passage took it to an entirely different level that became more than just flex, it's flex and rotational habitat by having six main yards of which you walk into, not only are you immersed in a landscape but you're immersed in the actual exhibitry and once you walk into Toyota Elephant Passage, you're completely surrounded by animals and those animals are moving on a constant basis.

So whether it's by their choice or with the animal keepers, they're moving, they're active, they're swimming.

- [Second Female Narrator] Toyota Elephant Passage has 138 gates that can be used daily, and 1.2 million gallons of pool water, a mammoth undertaking.

(machine turns on) - Come on boys.

(tranquil ambient music) Good boy Jake.

Jake's favorite is anything food, so he's not really picky at all.

So this is Billy.

Billy has the most pink freckles of any of our elephants.

Asian elephants get pink discoloration on their skin that look kind of like freckles.

African elephants don't, that's one of the ways you can tell them apart.

We have the largest bachelor herd in North America, so we have all male elephants living together and that's how male elephants naturally socialized.

We're always moving around to get them to where they're, who they're gonna be socializing with, what yards they're gonna be in.

They spend time in different yards all the time.

We share Toyota Elephant Passage with three greater one horned rhinos which gives them a really natural enrichment where they're gonna be smelling other animals that they would be smelling and coming into contact with in Southeast Asia.

So as they move around, we do a lot of shifting all day and then also pulling them in and out for training sessions, any medical treatments that they need.

They're ready to go out.

All right.

(industrial machine running) (metal clanging) - I think Clayton asked, what's important?

Wat can we do?

What should we do?

And the comment came Asian elephants and bull male Asian elephants are the most important thing we could do for zoo communities.

And so we started to walk that road.

That road being the hardest possible road you could choose, the most difficult kind of engagement of the largest animals that you, (chuckles) that you hold in the campus.

That conversation was 10 years before we cut the ribbon, it's achieved the highest level in that exhibit, I really believe that.

(tranquil ambient music continues) - [Second Female Narrator] 2021 marks the zoo's 125th anniversary.

Walking through the campus today, visitors can witness the Denver Zoo's evolution and design.

Some older buildings have been replaced while others have been adapted and repurposed.

- The brick maintenance barns were really masterpieces of architecture and I think that's reflected of the fact that those structures have been added to the National Register of Historic Places.

In the 1990s the buildings received funding, which allowed them to be preserved and these buildings are now really ready to serve the zoo for the next 100 years.

But structures that were built in the late 1800s to house animals, really are no longer adequate in terms of what we know animals need to be healthy and psychologically happy in a habit.

- We're always trying to say, how can we improve this and make this the best for the animals that are in there?

Or is there a different animal that might work better in there?

Or do we need to take it down, right?

Is it just not work.

In the felines building, that's where we had lions that's where we had tigers and we've learned over time that those spaces, especially the holding spaces, aren't big enough.

That's a great exhibit for a parrot.

So at Bear Mountain, we've housed a lot of different species over the years and at some points in time, we had polar bears over there and we've also had sea lions over there.

The Marine Mammal Protection Act came along and it had specific guidelines around how animals need to be cared for in captive collections for any marine mammals.

Bear Mountain didn't provide all of those aspects, the amount of pool space holding.

And so from that, you got our polar bear exhibit that we built as well as our sea lion exhibit that we built.

- 2018 was a 100 year anniversary of Bear Mountain.

We've recently moved the bears out of Bear Mountain into Harmony Hill our new bear exhibit.

That's the first time that bears have been moved out of Bear Mountain and put into a different place in a 100 years.

The Harmony Hill creates the immersion in a slightly different way, it may not be landscape immersion, but it's story immersion.

- You might be camping in nature, and we wanted to put people in this situation with tents and the things that they would do, lifting your food storage up so that bears would stay away from it, and tell the stories, the important stories about people interacting with wildlife in a very safe way.

- And that's certainly not the technique that was used a 100 years ago at Bear Mountain, but something that we think is really important now and advances the mission and the experience.

- In 2018 with the opening of Harmony Hill, Bear Mountain was really no longer needed to house bears but the structure is so historically important and such a beloved part of the zoo, that the zoo really wanted to keep it going forward into the future.

So they received a grant from the State Historical Fund to conduct a historic structures assessment to make plans for the preservation of Bear Mountain so that it could continue well into the 21st century.

- [George] Bear Mountain is the first example of naturalistic exhibitry habitat zoo design, artificial rock work in the country.

- [Bert] And that's what continues to make that exhibit worth preserving and highlighting for generations of visitors and beyond.

- [Second Female Narrator] Bear Mountain is not only a monument to the Denver Zoo's history of innovation and commitment but also a monument to how far the institution has come.

- And if you look back at how it came, it was not easy and nothing has been.

And that's also part of the important story and legacy of Bear Mountain, that if you wanna do something great, if you wanna do something impactful, it is going to be difficult.

And that has been the case for everything we've done.

- [Second Female Narrator] The zoo has tackled countless challenges through the passion both staff and visitors have for wildlife and animal care.

This has inevitably led to hard moments.

Staff and visitors alike have mourn the passing of animals since the zoo's inception.

- We're always challenging ourselves to take the best care of the animals that we have because these guys are our connection, these are the connection that we have to the wild and Denver Zoo has always been progressive, we were one of the first zoos to have a behaviorist, we were one of the first cities to have a nutritionist, we were one of the first schools to have a welfare program.

And so I wanna think how we can continue to be innovative in that space and continue to move the needle and care and continue to move the needle in conservation of wildlife.

Denver Zoo has always been one of the leaders and we will always be pressing that edge to say, can we do it better?

And we will.

We made a decision several years ago that we needed to build a brand new animal hospital that met the needs of the animals today and all the medicine that we can do 'cause that has evolved significantly.

- It's absolutely critical.

- [Brian] We have a really strong vet program, we have four board certified vets.

So they are certified in zoo medicine, that's four out of about 230 in the world, but we had a very old hospital.

- In 2020, we opened the Helen and Arthur E. Johnson Animal Hospital here at Denver Zoo.

- [Brian] Everything's state-of-the-art inside.

- It has a capacity for a small animal treatment room, a large animal treatment room, a surgery suite, a lab and we have a CT scan, so that's brand new equipment for us.

Then this provides us with all of the necessary medical equipment to provide really exceptional veterinary care.

(tranquil ambient music) The other thing that's unique about this building is that it will be visible to the public so they can come into the viewing area in the lobby and view us working in these spaces.

We'll be able to interact with the guests, they'll be able to ask us questions, we'll have a microphone and we'll have somebody out in the lobby that can facilitate questions and will be able to describe what we're doing.

- We're really opening it up to our guests.

And you're part of what's happening because we do a phenomenal job at it, it's critical to our operation.

I think that that's really important because it's not a behind the scenes function, it shouldn't be, people want to know how do you care for your animals.

And now we can share that as both an educational experience and an experience that can I think really continue to garner our community support for what we're doing here.

fundamentally, the history of the zoo is about the Denver community and the relationship with the community, it really is.

Economic down turn, recessions, depressions, we've been through them all, pandemics, a couple.

And in some ways I think it actually, it crystallizes and solidifies the relationship what's important, what's not.

And unfortunately for us, it's continually shown the commitment and the community commitment to the Denver Zoo and what we're doing.

I mean, the inception of Billy Bryant and the bear, it, in the park.

The 1950s, it was local community members giving their time and their money to a vision of the zoo.

All the way up to today, this is a story about our relationship with the community, with Denver.

Will you just look at this.

Perhaps we took for granted some of this love for, because I swear like I would never have thought that the gerenuk were gonna create a traffic jam.

(chuckles) (people chattering) In this time of COVID, you can see people like really wanting, that longing for this relationship is expressed again and people clogging up the phone lines and the internet to get their tickets and to come in and then having a traffic jam at the gerenuks, (chuckles) like really expresses the fact that, oh, no this is real, folks really want to see this and engage this.

- Conservation is about people that the goal of conservation is to save wildlife and wild places but people are going to have to do that.

AZA Zoos, see more people coming through their gates than the NHL, NBA, NFL, professional sports combined every year.

So that's a lot of people coming through our doors and starting to think about wildlife and what they can do.

- There may be a future veterinarian in that crowd, right?

There may be a future wildlife biologists in that crowd.

- [Thomas] It's one of the things I really love about the Denver Zoo is how diverse the people who come there and the people who work there really are.

So many people where this is probably the only place they're going to get to see most of these creatures.

(indistinct) (people chattering) Supporting your local zoo helps you get people on board with wildlife, saving wildlife and it helps you directly save wildlife.

Collectively, it's about $230 million a year that AZA Zoos contribute to wildlife conservation, and that's huge, there's very few conservation organizations that can actually say that they contribute that much.

(swoosh) And we have people who live and work in different countries around the world trying to save wildlife.

And we can work in Vietnam with Tonkin, snub nose monkeys, we work in Mongolia with scenarios vultures, argali sheep.

We work in Peru with the Lake Titicaca frog and the Lake Junin frog.

And then we work in Botswana primarily focused on African wild dogs, as well as vultures.

And we work right here in our backyard.

- The reality is wildlife populations that are here are effected by the same people that come and visit the zoo.

- [Second Female Narrator] For over 100 years, the zoo has aided the restoration and recovery of the American bison.

Recently local work has expanded from plane to peak.

- We work really across both our great plains and the Rockies and we focused on a variety of projects from the peaks of the prairies, that we have citizen science projects with PICA, we also work on big horn sheep and mountain goats at Mount Evans.

We work on boreal toad, we do a captive bread and reintroduction program.

Boreal toads are state list and endangered species and we read them on-site and then release them into the wild.

And then we started this new project with the Navajo Nation to conserve bighorn sheep.

(plane engine running) Navajo nation, they're almost extirpated.

So they were down to 34 animals in '97 and there was this great conservation success, they grew to 600 animals by 2016 and then disease came in and seeing really just dramatic declines in just a few years really.

(shoes crackling) What was a great conservation story is now really being threatened.

What we really wanna do is bring cutting edge science and match it with indigenous knowledge to identify solutions that are gonna protect both big horn sheep and indigenous pastoralists.

So I really think it can be a model that we can replicate in different areas.

- If you think of all the things that the zoo is doing simultaneously, it's trying to give good lives to individual captive animals, (tranquil flute music) it's trying to advance conservation projects with partners around the world, it's trying to provide jobs (background chattering) and economic growth for the Denver area, it's trying to provide cultural capital for Denver and surrounding areas.

It's trying to expose a variety of Denverites and Coloradans, a really diverse audience.

So, all of these I think are useful and important and maybe even essential functions in their own right.

I think what's open to question is whether a single zoo is the best place where all of these different functions can be accommodated thinking beyond the kind of current limitations of the zoo.

- I think it's normal that we would have a lively debate on what's the programmatic intent of a zoo in a city park and how much zoo should exist in that context.

And so our design evolution has to really account for all sides of that equation.

And it is a remarkable experience to bring together all of these passionate groups of people to try to build something new that's meaningful and long lasting.

- We have to continue to be really creative and thinking about how this campus looks, and how we make it the best for the animals and the best for the guests.

Resources are always a limiting factor, but we don't have to stop us from thinking big.

- Continuous improvement, I think is absolutely the legacy of the Denver Zoo, the history of the Denver Zoo and the practice of the Denver Zoo.

As you look at the history and you think about today, the constant chorus is, why do we exist?

How can we be better?

And how can we fulfill even greater missions?

And it's consistently been that way.

- We live in a world that is increasingly aware of the interconnectivity of humans and animals and zoos certainly fulfill the role of helping us better understand our relationship to the natural environment.

As our climate changes, what are the impacts to animals?

And can zoos help us preserve those species so that they are not faced with extinction?

- As we have encountered COVID and we've encountered other pandemics, we've seen the connection, it's all logical disease transfer coming from animals to humans, it is an alarm bell.

Zoos can play a role in that.

- The critical loss in the actual habitat and actual species means that our mission is more important than it ever has been.

Inspiring communities to save wildlife for future generations.

Owning the complexity of a zoo, I think is the biggest challenge and the one that we need to step up to everyday, not easy, and takes considerable effort, often considerable time, always considerable money.

Fortunately, it's inspiring people, it's inspiring work, it's meaningful work.

So it's one of the easiest things in the world to get up in the morning and show up for that.

- We think big, and then we figure out how we can do it.

(violin music continues dramatically) (tranquil ambient music)