ARTIS

This guide to ARTIS, Amsterdam's oldest zoo, opens on an August morning in 1883, when a keeper found a striped-shouldered, plain-rumped mare dead in her enclosure — an animal called a quagga, living here since 1867. It traces the herds that once grazed South Africa's Cape Colony, the settlers who saw them as competition for grazing land, and the request the zoo sent back to Africa for a replacement. Listen while walking past the zoo's historic aquarium and arboretum, founded in 1838.