John Aspinall, who has died aged 74, after a long battle with cancer, was perceived as either a magnificently over-lifesized English gentleman, animal lover, gambler and eccentric, or as a distinctly more sinister individual, who would have been quite content to feed his fellow human beings to his preferred species - the ferocious tigers with which he spent his life trying to "bond".

Those in the "pro" lobby pointed to his two private zoos in Kent, Howletts and Port Lympne, which cost him around £4m a year (only about one-tenth of which was recovered by ticket sales) and had a better record of breeding endangered species than many grander and more conventional establishments. They pointed out that in the various gaming clubs he had run over the years, he had probably done more than Karl Marx to bring about the redistribution of wealth and the ruination of the rich.

Those in the "anti" lobby, who regarded James Bond's melodrama villains, Goldfinger and Dr No, as realistic characters in comparison, pointed to Aspinall's catalogue of beliefs - that the world's population would be better if culled by 2bn of the less intelligent; that Hitler was right about eugenics (though wrong about other matters); that everyone should feel himself to be a member of a tribe that was better than any other; that instinct and prejudice were more reliable guides to behaviour than reason; that, as a worshipper of the natural world, he worshipped earthquakes and plagues; and that he would glady sacrifice the life of his own children to save an endangered species.

Aspinall was not a comfortable person to be with or to contemplate, except perhaps for a small coterie of fellow gamblers and financial pirates, who presumably had a clearer idea of when he was joking. Over the years, that coterie included Sir James Goldsmith and Lord "Lucky" Lucan. Aspinall and Goldsmith were rumoured to have been among the council of war which met to consider Lucan's future the day after he had experienced some alleged difficulty with a length of lead pipe and the skull of his children's nanny.

Aspinall's world, though aspiring to the tenets of the jungle, was a hermetically sealed one of port and cigars, in which tigers, apes and gaming chips provided a self-prescribed danger and excitement in a little world surrounded, in his eyes, by the mediocre and mundane. The fact that it was usually his zoo employees rather than himself who were killed or mauled in pursuit of his theory of close "bonding" with wild animals - though he himself suffered in no small measure - was a component of the exotic equation of his life, which appeared to elude any sense of irony he may have possessed.

Both Howletts and Port Lympne seemed to attract human disaster. Aspinall's daughter-in-law, Louise, was bitten by a tiger cub and needed 15 stitches. A boy of 10 had his arm ripped off by a chimpanzee at Port Lympne, and was awarded £132,000 in damages. Bindu, an English bull elephant, crushed a "bonding" keeper to death. The most recent victim, 27-year-old Darren Cockrill, was crushed by an elephant at Port Lympne last February.

In 1994, the local council banned the keepers from entering the tiger cages after one of their number, Trevor Smith, was killed at Howletts - Aspinall threatened to close down both zoos if the ban was enforced, and soon the keepers were back fondling the tigers. Balkash, the offending tiger, was described by Aspinall as coming from a "rather tricky line of tigers, the same line that produced Zeya, who killed two keepers 16 years ago. One tiger in 12 has this abberant streak. With humans, it is one in three."

Aspinall personally shot the tiger, and some of his detractors might not have been altogether surprised if he had been willing to shoot one in three human beings, though others saw his stance on culling the world population as the fantasising of a rich man who claimed he loved gambling precisely because it offered "excitement and despair".

It is possible that this tall, rangy man, with the public-meeting voice and the scarcely veiled contempt for most of his fellows, will be remembered for his services to gambling as much as that to wild animals. In this respect, his contribution was crucial and long-lasting.

As the 1950s came out of the grey austerity after the second world war, two phenomena intertwined: the desire of the British government to attract more foreign currency, and the desire of the rich to have a little more excitement.

Gambling was an obvious means of satisfying both these phenomena. But, at that time, it was illegal to attract rich foreign and British punters by setting up a casino in which gambling could take place for money; and there was still a strong religious and moral feeling against any relaxation of the law. Aspinall, who felt that Christianity was dull, was a man who could have been selected by destiny to bombard such an impasse.

John Victor Aspinall was born in India, ostensibly the son of Colonel Robert Aspinall, an Indian army doctor who had married a titled woman. It was years before she confessed to John that his real father had been Captain Bruce, of the Lincolns, who had had his way with her under a tamarind tree beside a lake in Uttar Pradesh after a regimental ball.

This evocative revelation did not seem to throw Aspinall. He searched out his real father in an old people's home and supported him for the rest of his life. But it may have added to a sense of the unreality of human relationships. As a boy, he had been thrown out of Rugby for inattention. Accounts of his university career vary, though the majority verdict is that he left Jesus College, Oxford, after faking illness so that he could go to the Ascot Gold Cup instead of completing his exams. He went down without a degree, but won a reputed fortune on the race. He joined the Royal Marines, but was too rebellious to gain a commission.

It was hardly a surprise when, in the 1950s, he hit on the Flashman-esque expedient of circumventing the gaming laws by running games of chance, mostly chemin de fer, at various private addresses (not covered by the law) in Mayfair and thereabouts. In 1962, when the law was relaxed - very much due to Aspinall's campaigning - he opened the Clermont Club, and profited by the losses of high rollers like Lucan, who could not afford it, and Goldsmith, who could, as well as overseas gamblers from the United States and Middle East.

In the early 1970s, Aspinall sold the Clermont for £500,000 - just before a market crash drove the gamblers away. Then, in the late 1970s, he popped up again with the Aspinall Curzon, backed by Goldsmith, and, in 1987, sold it to Peter de Savary for £90m. With about £20m of the proceeds, he established a trust to fund his two zoos.

"My friends say I'm better with my back to the wall," he once said. "I'm like an old warrior who can galvanise himself when he's threatened, but I'm pretty idle when I've got no threats."

Aspinall was probably neither hero nor villain, but simply a wildly out-of-fashion romantic, who saw himself, like everything else, in romantic terms. This did not always sit easily with the reality of his relationships. He was married first, in 1956, to Jane Gordon Hastings, by whom he had a son and daughter. They were divorced in 1966, after which he married Belinda Musker, divorcing in 1972. His third wife was Lady Sarah Courage (neé Curzon), by whom he had one son.

Aspinall sometimes spoke about the children he had "sired", romantically confusing the language of the stable with that of the jungle in which he saw himself bonding with other wild creatures. The injuries sustained indicated that the desire to bond was tragically stronger on his side than theirs.