a Christmas sleepover at the zoo

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In the 2006 film Night at the Museum, Ben Stiller takes a job as a museum security guard, only to discover that the exhibits come to life once the visitors have disappeared. Would a night at the zoo prove similarly revelatory?

Since 2016, London Zoo has been offering visitors the chance to stay over. For Christmas, it is putting a festive wrapping on the experience: a cup of mulled wine, toasted marshmallows, piped-in Christmas tunes, et cetera.

Personally, I associate the zoo with crowds of impatient children, not least because I used to be one of them. Staying overnight is a chance to see the place near-empty.

The wooden guest cabins (which the zoo calls lodges) are nestled next to the lions and the vultures. I stood in the darkness observing my fellow creatures, as the electric fence crackled between us. This is when I realised: it’s not the zoo animals whose behaviour radically changes at night, it’s our own. Without the restless energy of London in daytime, you don’t feel the urge to move to the next enclosure. You can stop and look at other animals with the care that they deserve.

I am a zoo sceptic. I don’t believe most of the work zoos do is vital to conservation, or that their educational value is as strong as it was before nature documentaries

The real perk of an overnight stay is three guided tours: one before dinner, one after dinner and one after breakfast. We were given red torches, whose light is less disturbing for the animals. We stood on the other side of the glass from five Asiatic lions, surviving London’s Arctic temperatures thanks to a heated lamp and stones. Our cheery young guides explained how the number of wild Asiatic lions had gone from just 20 a century ago to 600 (all live in the Gir National Park in Gujarat).

The tours are accessibly educational. Leaf-cutter ants, we were reminded, do not eat the cut leaves, they use them to grow fungi that they eat. You can tell an ape from a monkey because an ape doesn’t have a tail. Cape porcupines are the third-largest rodents. “If you want to know how cute the animals are from one to 10, we can tell you that too,” one guide joked.

I am a zoo sceptic. I don’t believe that most of the work zoos do is essential to conservation. I don’t believe that their educational benefits are as strong as they were in a time before nature documentaries. They are hangovers from a different time, an age of empire and exploration, when animal welfare barely mattered. Even David Attenborough, who brought animals from the wild for zoos early in his career, now says that gorillas should not be kept in captivity.

London Zoo, founded in 1828, has changed in response to welfare concerns. It no longer houses polar bears or elephants. The Humboldt penguins now live around a large pool, rather than the beautiful but inappropriate modernist one whose concrete damaged their feet and whose slide they could not use. (These penguins prefer jumping.)

The defunct penguin pool is Grade 1-listed and cannot be replaced by something capable of habitation. As such, it is a microcosm both for London planning problems and for London Zoo’s difficulty in reinventing itself completely. The basic problem remains fitting charismatic animals into a small piece of central London. Can giraffes really exhibit natural behaviours, living between two minor ring roads?

That said, the guides emphasised the Zoological Society of London’s conservation work. They discussed the risks of the pet trade, the need for zoo animals to have “enrichment” (aka stimulation), and how, by 2050, rising sea levels are expected to wipe out all the places where Komodo dragons currently live. We watched a pair of African grey parrots, once kept as pets, perfectly mimic the beeping of a guide’s radio. We agreed that they were wonderfully intelligent animals who should not be pets.

The food is hearty, rather than gourmet. Our lodge was comfy, although not entirely set up for the zero-degree temperatures. For Zone 1 accommodation in London, it would still count as good value.

Whichever animals you see (the tours mix up the range), there are wonders. How could we let any of these species slip away? The bunny-like Malagasy giant jumping rat, critically endangered, was a new find for me. In their pool, the penguins “porpoised” speedily through the water. We went to sleep having seen a tiny coral reef, we woke to hear the male lion growling, as he marked his territory by pacing a figure of eight. Children, in particular, are likely to love the experience.

A night at the zoo allows you to see the animals more closely and intimately than would otherwise be possible. But to be truly worthwhile, it must be a springboard to imagining a different side to ourselves: one in which the survival and wellbeing of other animals matters.

Henry Mance is the FT’s chief features writer

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