LONDON — John V. Aspinall, a rakish millionaire who made his fortune in the port-and-cigar world of upper-class gambling tables in London and devoted it to creating country estates for breeding gorillas and tigers — species that he said he preferred to humans — died of cancer Thursday in London. He was 74.
Believing that man should be guided by primitive instinct rather than reason and determined to close the gulf between the species, Aspinall delighted in romping with his wild animals.
He encouraged his zookeepers to do likewise, sometimes with horrific consequences. Five were mauled to death in the past 20 years, the most recent one this February, yet Aspinall successfully fought off laws that would have barred the workers from entering enclosures.
Of his 30 best friends, he said, half were animals, and he argued that at one time there had been a golden age in which beasts and humans had been equal. Asked once whether he would leave his children in the company of his wild animals, he said, "I'd rather leave them with gorillas than with a social worker."
The success he had in fleecing some of London's more louche aristocrats and rich foreign visitors in his Mayfair gambling clubs and then spending the profits on his own eccentric model of animal protection was sometimes said to have done as much for redistributing the wealth in Britain in the 1960s as the social programs of the liberal intelligentsia who regularly excoriated him for his extreme right-wing views.