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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.

People have been visiting zoos to look at non-human animals for almost two centuries. They observe a real animal, but what they see in their mind’s eye could be informed by how the animal is represented in the zoo’s guidebooks. Representations are rooted in two ways of looking: one positions the animal as an object of scientific study representative of his or her species, the other turns him or her into an individual animal with a life framed in terms of human experiences. Bristol Zoo Gardens, opened in 1836, offers a rich case study of the value of guidebooks because of its long history and surviving sources. The article begins by highlighting the theoretical approach adopted before applying it by reviewing the objectification and anthropomorphism of different animals over the chronological range of guidebooks. It then interrogates the depiction of gender roles to illuminate this style of representation.

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This article offers an overview of some approaches from the history of emotions that environmental historians could employ in order to sharpen engagement with emotion, and applies some of these approaches to a long history of human–frog interactions, by way of example. We propose that emotions have played a key role in the constitution of human communities, as well as enabling or inhibiting particular kinds of human thoughts and actions in relation with the living planet. In tracing human–frog relations over time we tease apart the complex historic relationships between cultural frameworks, scientific expectations and conventions, and the texts and images emerging from these contexts, which operate explicitly or implicitly to train and discipline the emotional selves of human adults and children.