Photograph by Jeremy Kramer
It isn’t true that Thane Maynard joined Cincinnati Zoo’s staff shortly after its 1875 launch. Given how closely he’s associated with the institution internally and with the public, it just feels that way.
Maynard was hired in the Cincinnati Zoo’s fledgling education department in 1977 and later served as director of education, appearing with animals on national TV and launching The 90-Second Naturalist radio program on WVXU-FM. He’s served as zoo director since 2006.
He speaks with Cincinnati Magazine about the Cincinnati Zoo’s past, present, and future; the difference between zoos and circuses; the book he recently co-wrote with Jane Goodall; and humans’ fascination with encountering animals in person.
What’s your favorite part of your job?
Well, you’re lucky when you work at a zoo because it’s a very kinetic place. We’re in the animal business, of course, which is what drew me, but obviously we’re in the people business. If we weren’t open to the public, we’d just be a breeding farm out in the middle of Montana or something. Zoos are these urban phenomena, and Cincinnati Zoo is the biggest draw in the city. We average more than 5,000 visitors every day of the year.
At least twice a day I walk the zoo, usually when I first come in the morning, just checking things out, and later in mid-afternoon after lunch so I don’t feel like I need to take a nap. I can connect with the folks who work here, of course, and all our volunteers and zoo teams, as well as with our visitors. It’s probably much like, if somebody owns a restaurant, they get out there in the restaurant and see how everything’s going.
How did you end up in Cincinnati and at this zoo?
My college girlfriend was from Cincinnati, and when she got out of school she worked at Cincinnati Magazine as a fledgling writer. Like a lot of 23-year-old boys, I didn’t have the vaguest idea what I wanted to do after college. I was at grad school at the University of Michigan, and she tracked me down, and the next thing you know we got married. So, I woke up one day and realized, “Well, I don’t think I’m gonna get to just go to Africa and hang around and see what’s going on, so I should probably find a job.” I looked all around and in Cincinnati, because that’s where she was living and she had a job, and I tracked down an alum from the University of Michigan program I was in, a biology professor at UC. She told me, “They’re building a new education center up at the zoo. You ought to go see if they need anybody.” I was just in the right place at the right time. Now, two generations later, I can guarantee you there would be 500 qualified kids applying for that education job for sure. But back then zoos were just in an early phase of really blossoming into these great big community education member-based centers.
As you walk around and interact with visitors, do you get the sense that people know who you are?
I think they do. I’ve sort of been the front man for this band for almost 50 years. And if you’re walking around looking like a zoo guy with a zoo ball cap on it, you look like you know what you’re doing. For much of my career people mistook me for Jack Hanna at the Columbus Zoo. He would take animals out like I did and go on national TV. He’s having a hard time now [Hannah was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2021], but Jack’s a good guy and a friend right up the road.
The main thing I love about walking around the zoo or frankly anywhere is people connect with me about how important the zoo is to their family. People join the zoo because they care about endangered species. You know, “We’re going to save rhinos,” and all that. And that’s certainly the work we do. But we also play a role in our community. And for a zoo like ours, that’s more important than most because we don’t get a tremendous amount of public support as a percentage of revenue like some zoos do, so we really need to be relevant to our community and our customers. And thankfully we are. As I say sometimes, Cincinnati is a zoo town.
You want people in the community to literally feel ownership of Cincinnati Zoo, but then sometimes they might feel a little bit too much ownership, like, “Hey, wait, this is my zoo, this isn’t your zoo.” Does that create a few issues every now and then?
People love the zoo, and they love certain animals and naturally wish we had more. For instance, as we’ve grown over the last decade, we had a big campaign called More Home to Roam that added more space for the elephants and the penguins and others. But in the short run that meant we no longer had space for some of our animals. Right now, we don’t have sea lions or polar bears, and the reason is those areas weren’t big enough for up-to-modern-standards exhibits. Where the sea lions were is now an A-plus African penguin exhibit, and where the polar bears were will be a new exhibit for sea otters. I talk with people who tell me, “Hey, what the heck? Bring back the sea lions and the polar bears.” We’re working on it. We are making progress, but sometimes progress is glacial.
Cincinnati Zoo has been around for 150 years and plans to be around for many more, so everything doesn’t have to be fixed tomorrow. Do visitors tell you you’re on the right track?
We’re very fortunate that we have a huge membership base. More than 70,000 families in the tri-state belong to the zoo and come regularly. We have tremendous visitation, almost 2 million people a year. And almost all of those folks come because they’re really delighted by our animals and what we’re doing. Of course, in today’s world, you get a lot of feedback, and some will say, “Yeah, well, you need to improve this exhibit.” But usually that ends up in a good dialogue, and people end up supporting what we’re doing.
Once in a while you’ll run into someone who just doesn’t like zoos. And if that happens, we have a standing offer to say, “Come on over, we’ll show you what we do.” I’ve found a lot of times that if someone says, “I’m an animal rights activist, I don’t like cages, I don’t like the zoo,” you realize they haven’t been to the zoo in 25 years. A modern zoo is very different from the zoo I showed up at in the 1970s. We have really spacious exhibits that give animals their best life. What that means is that we’re full of endangered animals who are having a hard time out in nature. So having them here, keeping them safe and giving them a good life, is what we do.
Almost always, those people who come and they aren’t a zoo believer, just an hour later they say, “Man, I didn’t know you had a major conservation program or a full-time high school that’s part of Cincinnati Public Schools. I didn’t know you have a big reproductive research program or Botanical Gardens.” We do a lot more than just house Fiona the hippo. Though she is our superstar.
Speaking of Fiona, when you were talking about walking around and people recognizing you, do the animals know you?
The animals recognize two sets of people: whoever’s feeding them and the veterinarians. They recognize their keepers because they know he or she will feed them. Much the same way you might say, “Oh man, my dog really loves me.” Well, your dog really loves you because you keep feeding it. And our vets do a great job with much more veterinary care and nutrition care than we had 50 years ago. Of course, animals are wary of the veterinarians, just like humans can be wary of the doctor.
Let’s go back 150 years. How would you describe Cincinnati Zoo in 1875? What would it have looked like? How big would it have been?
We’re in the very same 67-acre park we were back in 1875. During the Victorian era up until the 1910s, there weren’t any cars, so the zoo was all for people and animals. And then from about 1920 to 1950 they paved over almost a third of the zoo just to get people in here. Our big leap forward in the past decade has been to push all those cars out to off-site parking.
Looking back, there wasn’t a lot shaking in Cincinnati in the 1870s. It was a busy river town, for sure, and Mark Twain famously had been through here and John James Audubon worked with the museum in town. But if you think of a family wanting to do something together on a Sunday, what were they going to do? There was no electricity, no amusements, nothing really to speak of other than just going outside in a park. And there weren’t that many parks yet.
Certain people thought a zoo would bring something to do, and this site was kind of out in the country back then. The group organizing it were German immigrants led by Andrew Erkenbrecher who wanted to recreate what they had in towns like Stuttgart and Frankfurt.
They considered Burnet Woods, which would have been a great spot. They considered a part of Mt. Adams, which was undeveloped at the time. And they chose this site because it was the terminus of the streetcar. The streetcar came uphill from the river, drawn by draft horses because it was so steep, and ended at what is now the corner of Vine and Erkenbrecher, where the zoo is. Those were just dirt roads back then. This streetcar was a major innovation, because suddenly you could ride cleanly and smoothly to get uptown. In fact, the zoo was actually subsidized from its opening all the way through 1917 by the Cincinnati Traction Company, the streetcar operator.
The zoo experience was very formal compared to today, even on a Sunday afternoon. Women had long dresses and big skirts. Men had on wool suits with hats because it was an outing. It was a formal era, and so people got dressed up to go out. A little bit like not that long ago when people went to the symphony or the opera they got dressed up. In fact, even if they went on a train or an airplane, they got dressed up.
One of the reasons it was formal back then is there were lots of cultural events. The folks who founded the zoo, known at first as the Cincinnati Zoological Garden, modeled it on German urban gardens that were lush with plants. They wanted exotic animals and a place to hold cultural events, so early on there was a huge three-story clubhouse on the edge of the lake. They had weddings, debutant parties in a fancy restaurant with china, and all those kinds of things. Then they built a band shell and had members of the New York Metropolitan Opera come and sing, which led to the launch of Cincinnati Opera in 1920.
My sense is the zoo did not have much of a budget at all, because even when I showed up in the 1970s our budget was less than $2 million a year. Those things were funded by people in the community like Mary Emery and the Tafts. In fact, when the zoo went broke in 1917 those folks got together and purchased the zoo and basically gave it to the community.
Did children go to the zoo as well, or was this an adult-only sort of pastime?
Families then and now look for things to do, of course. Like any business that has to attract people, whether it’s an amusement park or a zoo or a museum or a restaurant or bar, you need to make sure you’re relevant to people. I’m certain that kids were a big part of the equation. I do know that zoo was very inexpensive all the way up into the 1960s, because I’ve seen pictures of entry signs where the zoo was still only 75 cents to get in for adults and 25 cents for kids. The world’s changed a little bit.
What do you think are the biggest changes over 150 years in terms of how you run a zoo, how you keep animals, and how you engage the public? And there is probably a thing or two that really hasn’t changed in 150 years.
Cincinnati is and has long been a pleasant and affordable place to live, so people have stuck around this zoo a long time. Our first director was Sol Stephan, for 54 years. He couldn’t walk very well toward the end, and he went around in a two-wheel carriage behind a donkey. Ed Maruska was director before me for 32 years. Now I’ve been at the zoo 48 years, though I’ve been director just 19. That gives you some longevity in these top jobs.
One of the key things that’s changed in the zoo business is that certainly in the 1870s, but even in the 1970s, it was all men. The keepers were farm boys. None of them went to college. They knew how to raise animals, so they didn’t need to go to college. Today it’s hard to get a job in this field without a college degree. We went from 1 percent female employees 15 years ago to now we’re 60 percent female employees. Almost all the zookeepers are young women, and the whole zoo field has changed in that regard.
Also, back in 1977, we didn’t have a staff veterinarian. We were like a farm: If an animal didn’t eat or didn’t get up, we called the vet, and he came over and checked on them. Now we have three full-time vets and four full-time vet techs, who are like animal nurses. We have 13 people with Ph.D.s and a total of five people with veterinary degrees. Almost all of those scientists are women.
Another change is it was relatively easy, all the way until the early 1970s, for zoos to acquire animals. A director would call an animal dealer and say, I need two zebras and three monkeys, and I need them by Memorial Day. And the dealers would send people to Africa or South America and catch the animals, put them in a cage, and ship them here somehow. Those days are gone. With the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and then with big international accords, you can’t just go and capture animals in Borneo and bring them to the zoo now.
As a result, animals in zoos have to be very carefully bred to avoid inbreeding. We might have, say, a baby animal born here, but that animal probably won’t stay here because you don’t want it to breed with its parents when it becomes mature. There’s a lot of horse trading. It’s kind of like Match.com but trickier because animals don’t always pair up easily. The messaging behind zoos has certainly changed and strengthened over time in response to the fact that almost all the animals we have here face some level of threat.
There was little media exposure back in the day to the wider world, so the zoo provided an experience of seeing a rhino or an elephant up close. How do you compete in the current multi-media world?
Zoos certainly provide the novelty of seeing exotic animals up close you wouldn’t see anywhere else. What’s strengthened over time is our depth of programs. For instance, we have the world’s largest zoo education center with 13 classrooms, and we have nearly 100,000 kids a year who participate in our summer and winter camps or spend the night at the zoo in our overnight program. We have a full-time high school called the Zoo Academy. In terms of education classes, they start engaging 18-month-old children with a program called Zoo Troops. And you can go all the way through college and get a master’s degree from the zoo through Miami University.
One of the big focus areas for you and for the zoo is sustainability, which 48 years ago may not have been in the top five of your career goals. Or anybody’s goal.
I’m humbled to say that until 19 years ago, when we hired our first civil engineer, Mark Fisher, in 2006, the zoo had never done anything with sustainability. We ran the zoo like a farm and said, “OK, if that old truck or that old HVAC system or that old lighting system keeps working, we’ll just keep going.” We hired Mark, and he walked around and then said, “This is the most wasteful equipment I’ve ever seen in my life.” He said the boiler in one of our biggest buildings where we kept tropical animals in the winter was as efficient as using a campfire. The boiler was large enough to fill up a two-car garage. What we replaced it with was a machine in the corner that looked like a dishwasher, because it’s just all gotten a lot more energy efficient. We’ve invested a lot of money into saving water and installing solar energy. It’s not an overstatement at all to say this is the greenest zoo in America and maybe in the world.
Photograph courtesy Cincinnati Zoo
Beyond saving money for the zoo, you strive to be a community voice for sustainability. Is that why you do the 90-Second Naturalist radio show?
For us, sustainability is helping people make smarter choices all day long. We all use resources, but there’s a smart way to do it versus a wasteful way to do it. Our big sustainability play begins when you first visit the zoo and see the parking lot solar panels, and you’re like, “Oh, that’s interesting.” And then you hear about the water recycling and all the other things, and that’s not us preaching—that’s us demonstrating that you can make it happen right here in the Midwest.
In fact, we get a lot of feedback from colleagues at zoos on the coast, where, of course, they think everyone in the Midwest is just in the Rust Belt. And the truth is we eat their lunch with sustainable practices. We take it seriously.
Besides the breeding concerns, are there other reasons why zoos don’t collect animals from the wild any longer?
There’s a phenomenon called zoonotic diseases, in which illnesses can jump between animal breeds and between animals and humans. If you think about it, all of the big global pandemics—whether it’s the 1918 flu or COVID or influenza—did what’s called a “spillover” from wild animals to humans. Here at the zoo, we’re very cautious, especially around our primates. The zookeepers working with primates always wear masks and gloves in the interest of not spreading human diseases to them. In fact, those species are on the same medicines we’re on. Our female gorillas every day take a human birth control pill, and others are on the same heart medications that humans take.
The birth control didn’t work that well for Gladys. Well, you did that on purpose, right?
Gladys is a good example of how an accredited zoo has not taken gorillas out of the wild since 1972 due to the Species Survival Plan but in that time 51 baby gorillas have been born here. In order for that to happen, you have to be very careful who breeds with who. She’s due to give birth soon.
Speaking of Gladys, there are certain animals—Fiona, her brother Fritz, Harambe—who are given names and become personalities, and people become attached to them. How do you balance that personal connection with the idea that these are wild animals and need to be treated as such?
Our mission at the Cincinnati Zoo is to inspire everyone with wildlife every day. We do it through social media and all kinds of other ways, but where it really happens is right here in this park. In the zoo business, there’s an old adage that fun is fundamental. If we want to inspire people and want them to care and want them to come back to the zoo, we want it to be fun. We do want them to fall in love with our animals. There’s no sense having a baby Fiona and not giving her a name, of course. We’re 100 percent fine with that.
Not too far removed from the zoo experience is the circus experience, where animals perform. Just in the last 20 to 30 years the public’s attitude about the circus has completely changed. How do you view that change?
There are lots of folks involved with animal welfare and animal rights, and we often have discussions with them—sometimes via e-mail, sometimes in person. And pretty quickly we realized that we agree on about 99 percent of things because we’re both really interested in animals. I think, when they see what a modern zoo does, most of them are pretty pleased. Nobody’s more interested and involved with the question of animal welfare than Jane Goodall, and she supports good zoos, and I just wrote a book with her.
In the case of how circuses suddenly fell out of favor, a big reason was the transport of elephants or tigers from town to town to town in trains for days and nights, which inflicts a lot of wear and tear. A modern accredited zoo does a good job making sure animals have a good life.
The other difference, of course, is in the mission and the purpose of what we’re doing. I think most people, when they see animals that are well cared for, whether that’s out on a farm or at a little nature center that has animals or at the Cincinnati Zoo, can recognize that there’s a purpose to it.
How have zoos adapted to changing times when perhaps circuses did not?
Change has certainly happened across a continuum, but in the last 50 years we’ve seen the zoo field slowly move forward for all kinds of reasons. Some are the kind of preservation laws and accords I talked about. Some are, in fact, interest and pressure from the public to say, “Hey, are you doing a great job or not?” To be honest, nobody likes seeing animals in cages, so all of those things have helped improvement bubble along. There’s definitely been a rising sort of professionalism in our field. And so those things have led to a great renaissance in zoos worldwide, though I’m more familiar with American zoos.
When I started in the field, there were two leading U.S. zoos: the San Diego Zoo and the Bronx Zoo in New York. Those were big-budget operations with great big staffs, and they played at a different level. That’s changed to the point that today there are 50 zoos that are very substantial institutions, including a number of zoos here in Ohio, and there are something like 234 accredited zoos in the U.S. And by no means do I want to talk down small zoos. A friend of mine used to run the zoo in Providence, Rhode Island, and he had his staff wear T-shirts that said “Small zoos kick butt,” because a lot of times small zoos sure can have that attention to really care for individual animals and do individual programs.
And so, with his great renaissance there are towns you go to and, if you haven’t visited their zoo in the last 10 years, you’d say, “Wow, this is a lot better.” The zoo in Dallas is an excellent zoo today and historically wasn’t as good. The zoo in Omaha, Nebraska, is an excellent zoo today. You know, places you might not expect. I mean, we tease that Cincinnati is not a tourist town. Neither is Omaha.
You must have a pretty good finger on the pulse of where zoos are these days, because you’ve gotten to know a lot of key people and interact with them all the time.
I do, and we do. There’s a lot of cross pollination in zoos. Zoos are smaller businesses, so most people don’t come somewhere and stay for 48 years. If they start out as a keeper and want to become a head keeper, well, that job might not open up, so they go to another zoo. It’s very common in the zoo field that if you meet someone who’s done it a long time or you meet someone who’s a zoo director, they’ve worked at six, seven, eight different zoos as their career advanced. The nice thing about that is there’s all the cross pollination of ideas and techniques as we improve animal husbandry and training. Whether you need to, say, take blood from an animal or give an animal a shot, that takes training to get the animal to accept you’re going to do that. It takes a lot of care, husbandry, TLC, and food rewards.
The book you co-wrote with Jane Goodall was titled Hope for Animals and Their World: How Endangered Species Are Being Rescued from the Brink. What is your hope for animals looking ahead at, maybe not the next 150 years, but what the next 20 or 30 years will be like?
I try to have a hopeful message. That doesn’t mean we don’t understand that polar bears are under threat because polar ice is melting. It does not mean we don’t know that there are fewer lions than there were 25 years ago when the movie The Lion King came out. But just telling people that everything’s going wrong is not a way to get them to support and help our conservation work.
We all know there’s bad news in the world such as deforestation, climate change, and other things, but there’s a lot of good news too. When I moved to Ohio, there were zero bald eagle nests in the state because of pollution and DDT poisoning. You might have read recently that the Department of Wildlife announced there were now almost 1,000 active bald eagle nests in the state of Ohio. And if you don’t think so, go canoeing for just a couple of hours on the Little Miami or the Whitewater rivers and I guarantee you’ll see bald eagles. The polluted rivers couldn’t support fish, which was the eagle’s main source of food. All of us drink out of the river today and it’s fine. Now we do need a good filtration system, but nonetheless it’s a lot cleaner than if you ask any older person, who will tell you the rivers used to really stink.
Can animals continue to thrive in the wild given the huge undertaking that’s required to safeguard their habitats?
There will be winners and losers, no doubt about it. Animals need vast open spaces, or animals that have very specific habitat needs can be under particular pressure. I think of the Sumatran Rhino. We’re the only zoo that ever figured out how to breed them. We sent our last two back to Sumatra, where they live today, and the ones we released are breeding with wild girlfriends and have had offspring, and one of them has even had grandchildren. Pretty much everybody else gave up on the Sumatran Rhino, because it’s probably the rarest mammal in the world, but we didn’t give up here at the Cincinnati Zoo. We’re still involved with them.
On the other end, there are more and better educated people working to protect wild areas. Not just through zoos, but through the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Nature Conservancy. I mean, the annual budget for the Nature Conservancy, which is the biggest conservation group in the world, is almost $2 billion now. It was founded in southwest Ohio, out in a prairie in Adams County, and grew from there. And they protect more wild habitats than any group in the world.
So good work is going on around us. It doesn’t make headlines, but it’s going. The scary areas in the future are the systemic ones. It’s one thing to say, “We’re going to save rhinos and set aside 100 acres for them.” But when we look at the decline in numbers of insects around the world, that’s very bad, because there’s nothing you can do to snap your fingers and stop it. That’s one reason we do so much from our Botanical Garden side—with community gardens and pollinator gardens, encouraging people to plant native plants. That’s the ultimate win/win. One thing I can encourage people to do is quit spraying poison because a mosquito spray doesn’t just kill mosquitoes, it kills fireflies and everybody else.
What do you think the Cincinnati Zoo is going to look like over the next few decades? Do you see huge changes, or do you think it’s all incremental adjustments as it goes?
Well, 30 years ago would be 1995, and we are a much bigger and more impactful organization than we were then. And yet at its heart it’s the same zoo. Thirty years from now, the park will be here where it is, but our programs will be far afield. They are now, but even farther. We have two farms in our area: a cheetah breeding farm where we also send some older animals out to pasture, as they say, and a big farm up in the Mason area where we grow food for our animals as well as native plants.
I think in order for the zoo to continue to thrive we need to make sure we’re still important to the families here. And I’m proud to say I think we are. Because I hear that everywhere I go. People come up to me to say their kids went to zoo camp and then became veterinarians, all kinds of things.
A famous biologist from Harvard named E.O. Wilson, who spoke here at the zoo, coined the term biophilia, and the concept is that people were born and raised in nature and have a natural affection for nature. And if you think of little kids and their response to animals—not just puppies but other animals—it’s innate. Now we can be taught to not like spiders or not like snakes, but I think there’s an innate curiosity about wildlife and a fascination about how the world works.
I would say that the zoo today is more important to families and young people coming up than it was 30 years ago, partly because it’s still real life. You know, we all have these cell phones. I mean, I’m an old man and I look at my phone all the time. It’s really valuable that families and kids can go somewhere where things are real, they can touch them, they can wonder about them. And I have to assume the world is going to be a lot more confusing 30 years from now.
Experiencing nature, not just the zoo but hiking in the woods and down the river, is a very calming thing, a very thoughtful thing, and I imagine that will be much more important as the decades pass. I don’t think the pace of life is going to slow down. I’m not sure it’s ever slowed down, but it certainly hasn’t slowed slow down since the dawn of electricity.
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