by Dr. Steve Best -
sbest1@elp.rr.com
The zoo is a perfect microcosm of the postmodern world.
As we swim in a sea of simulated, pseudo-realities of the National
Entertainment State, where everything from human bodies to national
politics is faked and contrived, why not simulate nature, wilderness,
animal behaviors, and entire species too? At this late stage in the
capitalist colonization of the planet, few pockets of the natural world
remain, and the zoo embodies the commodification, fragmentation, and
technification of living processes – biodiversity reduced to
artificially sustained “exhibits.”
As the contradiction between society and nature unfolds,
nature is increasingly dependent upon culture for the sustenance of
advanced life, but culture, wedded to mechanistic models and primitive
philosophies of hierarchy and domination, is not sufficiently advanced
to preserve evolution. The zoo is the perfect symbol then for the
entombment of the planet, for the sarcophagus of animal species, and for
a human power pathology spiraling out of control.
Imperialism By Other Means
Zoos are first and foremost about power relations; they are both a cause
and a symptom of the human will to mastery over the natural world. To be
placed in zoos, animals have been captured in the wild, taken from their
habitat and families, bound, manhandled, transported, caged, confined,
subjected to various timetables, compelled to feel pain, re-presented in
anthropocentric categories, and made subject to a continual human gaze.
By definition, a zoo is a public park that exhibits
animals for purposes such as entertainment or “education,” and they
should be distinguished from a “menagerie” collection of animals
maintained for various exploitative purposes, traveling zoos, or small
“roadside zoos,” such as the Tiger Truck Plazas in Louisiana and Texas
that confine tigers under ghastly conditions. The American Zoo and
Aquarium Association (AZA) accredit the “best” zoos, but many AZA-approved
zoos still badly abuse their animals (as was evident in the infamous
beating of Sissy the elephant by the El Paso Zoo in 1998). Moreover,
only about 10% of the more than 2,000 animal exhibitors licensed by the
United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) are accredited by the AZA.
We must also distinguish zoos from sanctuaries such as the Elephant
Sanctuary in Tennessee that preserve animals within expansive natural
surroundings, often completely closed from public viewing. Often,
however, zoos and menageries like “Noah’s Land Sanctuary” in Harwood,
Texas misleadingly claim that they are “sanctuaries,” when in fact they
are notorious animal abusers (all-too-tolerated by the USDA).
As Dale Jamieson writes in his essay “Against Zoos,”
modern zoos were founded in Vienna, Madrid, and Paris in the eighteenth
century and in London and Berlin in the nineteenth century. The first
American zoos were established in Philadelphia and Cincinnati in the
1870s. In his superb book, Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals in
Captivity, Randy Malamud exposes the zoo’s unwritten history in its
relation to colonialism. Zoos were inextricably bound up with
imperialism and its ideologies of conquest, and they provided
much-needed symbols and legitimation for conquering nations. Animals
captured in foreign lands during imperialist adventures were brought
back to capitals such as London in order to be displayed for a gawking
public. Exotic animals symbolized the empire’s prowess to gain dominion
over nature and culture, and they became prized objects of conspicuous
consumption.
As Marjorie Spiegel describes in her book The Dreaded
Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, the exploitation of animals
provided models for dominating African slaves, and numerous classes of
human beings – those belonging to “inferior” gender, race, or class
categories – are categorized as “animals” or “subhuman.” Zoos, in
particular, provided models of dehumanization. In the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, humans frequently were exhibited in cages
with animals. In blatantly racist ways, Moors, Tartars, Indians, Asians,
Eskimos, and African Bushmen, among a host of global others, became part
of an exotic collection of life forms on display, as various “freaks”
(“dwarfs,” giants, bearded women, and people with all kinds of
“oddities” and “deformities”) too were confined in zoo cages and
menageries. Humanitarian movements eventually stopped these practices,
but the “freaks” moved onto circuses where they perform to this day.
While moral progress compelled people to realize the wrong of exhibiting
humans, we await the next step whereby the world comprehends the
injustice of exploiting animals in zoos. Yet today no city is considered
complete without a public zoo as a major "tourist attraction."
The Berlin Wall of Species
The most fascinating thing about zoos is not their materiality -- the
cages, bars, walls, windows, moats, and enclosures; the closed world of
loneliness and pain pierced by cries in the night; the dank and fetid
smells of festering illness and misery. Rather, the main interest of
zoos lies in their underlying psychology; in the human mindset that
seeks to master nature, to domesticate wildlife, to exert its will to
power over what it deems inferior to itself; in the epistemologies of
hierarchy and rule that have defined the totality of Western culture
since its inception. The architectures of separation exist not so much
to detach us from any particular zoo animals, but from the natural world
as a whole; they are ontological dividing lines. Zoos separate us not
only from particular animals but also, more generally, from our own
animality, our evolutionary heritage, our biological ancestors – the
sentient and thinking beings with whom we share the dynamic adventure of
evolution and whose existence paved the way for our own. Thus, the walls
are not a physical as much as cultural means of separation; they split
life into “us” vs. “them” rather than establishing an evolutionary
continuum.
Zoo goers occupy the position of spectators, purveyors
of a gaze that objectifies animals and reifies them in a debased and
inferior state of being. The mere act of looking establishes a power
relation as the looker defines its visual target with the contemptuous
values that inform its judging eyes. There is no understanding or
respect when the subject beholds an object for its entertainment. As
Malamud observes, people who behold animals in zoo settings are no more
likely to respect them than they would appreciate cultural diversity by
looking at the dark-skinned human beings behind the bars of the
nineteenth century menageries.
Zoos speak simultaneously about the animal objects they
dominate, and the human dominating subjects. The abomination of zoos is
a projection of the horror that haunts the human spirit, its utter
revulsion from its own psychic roots and animalic origins. When we stare
through the bars at confined animals, at the hirsute commodities
imprisoned for entertainment value, we peer into the face of our own
alienation. Simultaneously, we see our past sins and our future
mortifications, as we ourselves decay with the death of nature. As we
gaze upon our genetic brethren who never look back at us, we demean
ourselves. The fact that – as insipid parents claim – their children
“enjoy” the zoo is not an argument for it, but a disturbing indication
of an early stage in the warping of a young mind. Apparently,
Schaudenfreude -- the delight in the suffering of others -- is good fun
for the whole family.
The School of Disinformation
Because of increasing public awareness about animal suffering and animal
rights, zoos are compelled to trot out flimsy justifications for their
existence. To warrant their existence, zoos advance two main arguments.
Zoos help to educate the public about animals and promote greater
respect for them, and they promote conservation efforts through
education and breeding and housing of endangered species.
The first claim assumes that the animal behaviors
spectators see are accurate, true, and natural, when in fact the
artificiality of the zoo environment distorts their entire life process.
For what spectators see are expressions of stunted, thwarted beings,
animals who are sad, lonely, injured, and depressed. We don’t see
tigers, elephants, and chimpanzees, rather, we see what is done to them;
we behold a social construction of the animal. To be sure, the lumbering
elephant is not just someone’s idea, but human concepts of it are
constituted through the prism/prison of cultural perspectives that are
more or less enlightened and scientifically accurate. Spectators think
they are seeing animals directly, but they are seeing them through
historically shaped paradigms and the crippling effects of the zoo
institution itself.
One might as well approach a study of human nature by
examining people locked up in asylums and prisons. Indeed, animals
suffer the same psychological effects from confinement and isolation as
do people, and thus the term “zoochosis.” Perhaps taken from their
families in the wild, unable to freely move, denied a rich social life,
their every need and instinct thwarted, and in possession of complex
minds, zoo animals suffer from various psychological problems, from
“stereotypic” behavior that includes pacing, head-bobbing, rocking,
walking in circles, compulsive licking, bar-biting, and even
self-mutilation (as in the case of chimpanzees who inflict serious bite
wounds on their limbs). According to Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna
of the Born Free Foundation, for instance, over 60% of polar bears in
British zoos are mentally deranged. Jane Goodall claims that over half
of the world’s zoos “are still in bad conditions.”
The main education a zoo provides is insight into what
an animal is not and into the alienated psyche of human beings. Even at
their best, zoos give a mixed message where, on the one hand, they may
help people understand the crisis facing species survival and make
animals more than an abstraction, but, on the other hand, they aggravate
alienation from nature and disrespect for life through
institutionalizing a human-nonhuman dualism via the spectator-object
split. Zoos inculcate a distorted sense of our place in the world, as
they indoctrinate us into a worldview that claims animals are resources
for us to eat, wear, experiment on, or be entertained by. When over 120
million people visit zoos every year in the United States, the messages
given out are of considerable importance.
The Myths of Conservation
The most plausible defense zoos have at their disposal in a time of
species extinction, habitat loss, and ecological crisis is that they
serve conservation purposes. In 1981, the AZA created the Species
Survival Plan program (SSP), designed to help prevent animal extinction
and to educate the public about conservation needs. Through its managed
breeding programs, the SSP boasts successfully preserving and
reintroducing into the wild numerous species such as black-footed
ferrets, condors, and red wolves.
But zoo conservationist credentials are highly dubious
and they play a minimal role in saving species from extinction. The
species zoos favor for “conservation” tend to be of the cute and cuddly
variety (what the AZA calls “flagship species which arouse strong
feelings in the public”) that do more to attract visitors than abate an
extinction crisis. Only 2% of endangered species are part of zoo
breeding programs, and few zoos are registered for captive breeding and
wildlife preservation. Often it is not zoos themselves that do the
breeding but remote breeding facilities, so why give zoos conservation
credit? Zoos have poor records of conservation and reintroducing animals
to natural habitat. Often, the animals are too accustomed to human care
and flounder on their own. Breeding herds typically are too small, and
inbreeding is a problem that leads to unhealthy animals and a diminished
gene pool. Further, zoos are not actively involved in habitat
preservation. Zoos therefore beg the question of what the point of
preservation is if there is no habitat to which animals can be returned.
As exposed in a 1999 San Jose Mercury News investigation
and meticulously documented in Alan Green’s shocking book Animal
Underground: Black Market for Rare and Exotic Species, the dirty little
secret of zoos is that they breed a surplus of many species, and these
animals become offloaded into a vast underground
multibillion-dollar-a-year market which attracts buyers through
resources such as The Animal Finders’ Guide. Zoos are an integral part
of a labyrinthine, shady world that includes dealers, hunters,
menageries, roadside attractions, fur farms, pet stores, circuses,
vivisectors, and slaughterhouses. Zoos often obtain breeding animals
from sleazy dealers and breeders. When “cute” zoo animals grow up and
have lost their initial attraction, and zoos need to make room for more
cuddliness, the animals are sent back to the underworld where they end
up as fodder for canned hunts, experimental laboratories, or even meat
for human consumption. As Green establishes, AZA policy prohibits this
kind of market but in practice they tolerate it, and even breed animals
specifically for hunters, with whom zoo board members often have cozy
relationships. Some of the world’s most highly regarded zoos, such as
the San Diego Zoo and the San Diego Wild Animal Park, have been among
the greatest offenders, cited for reselling thousands of rare and
endangered species between 1992 and 1998.
Fade to Black
We are in the midst of rapid species extinction and habitat loss. In May
2002, a United Nations study announced that almost a quarter of the
world’s mammals face extinction within 30 years. On the whole, the earth
is in the biggest extinction crisis since the demise of the dinosaurs 65
million years ago, but this crisis is created by human beings not the
natural world. “Evolution” – which advances through speciation and the
fecund creation of biodiversity – has ground to a halt and is reversing
direction toward homogenization and simplification of life forms.
Technoanimals created through captive breeding, in vitro
fertilization, and cloning (their DNA stored in “frozen zoos”) and who
live in artificial settings in effect become zoo animals that may look
like the real thing, but do not have natural behaviors, no more than
would “humans” cloned in isolated prison compounds would act like “human
beings.” One can have deep reservations about the viability of trying to
preserve life at this stage, and, in effect, some animals still alive
are already extinct. If their original habitat is bulldozed into
oblivion, the animals exist in confinement as mere simulacra of
themselves, and some critics believe it is better simply to permit
species to become extinct than to keep them alive as simulacra in
artificial environments.
To turn this crisis situation around, human beings have
to make radical changes on numerous fronts. First and foremost, we have
to dramatically reduce the world’s population. We must remove ourselves
ever farther from wilderness as we restore habitat and populate
ecosystems with indigenous species. We must quench insatiable consumer
appetites and return to simpler modes of living. Human beings need to
shift from a meat-based to a plant-based diet to conserve land,
resources, and energy. We must create an Endangered Species Act with
ferocious teeth in it that protect animals instead of the corporations
invading their habitat. We must deal with poachers in draconian terms
and shut down all markets for trade in animal products.
It is without question the case that human beings have
created a problem only they themselves can solve, and we must harness
the same amount of creative energy as we have amassed destructive energy
for millennia. As we hopefully begin to make needed changes on a global
scale, human beings must for now become stewards of the planet, as they
bear the burden of repairing evolution. That means we must actively
nurse the earth and its precious biodiversity back to health, and create
aggressive breeding and reintroduction programs.
From virtual reality and mass media, to artificial
intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering, and the gradual
transformation of human beings into cyborgs, everything once wild and
without technological mediation is disappearing. The natural world is
becoming transformed, redesigned, and merged into technological systems.
While we need not yearn for the days of hunters and gatherers, nor see
the move toward a technoworld as bad in every sense, it is nonetheless
the case that species are vanishing off the face of the earth at an
alarming rate and the forms in which they survive could be mere
fragments and simulacra.
Go on to Mass
Greyhound Slaughter Makes News
Return to 26 May 2002 Issue
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