“They pay the price for their beauty, poor beasts. Mankind wants to catch anything beautiful and shut it up, and then come in thousands to watch it die by inches.”
David Garnett – A Man in the Zoo.
Zoos have come to represent fun days for children, but the public spotlight is increasingly falling on this relic of colonialism. Like many institutions of the past that have fallen by the wayside as they no longer measure up to moral scrutiny (slavery and child labour spring to mind) modern society is increasingly questioning the incarceration of wild animals in cages.
Few are aware of the enormous cruelty inherent in the system. To be placed in zoos, animals have been captured in the wild, taken from their habitat and families, manhandled, transported, made to feel pain and caged in order to be exhibited and exposed to continual human gaze.
In their wild state, the average lion pride has a range of 15 to 150 square miles, depending on the carrying capacity of the habitat and prey density. Like elephants, primates and other wild animals, they live in colonies with strong social structures and hierarchies. So the environments provided by zoos are at best artificial, creating artificial animals, with not a thought to their sadness and loneliness, torn from their families, unable to live out their natural and social instincts, for the whole of their lifetimes, often decades.
States EC Young, Professor of Zoology, Auckland University: “The simple basis of my opposition to captivity in zoos is that we are holding animals in grossly unnatural, debilitating, and aberrant circumstances. None of their beauty and force and intelligence is apparent. Confined, frustrated, performing the same ritualistic and often dangerous damaging behavior of acute boredom, they caricature the real thing.” Confining wild animals to zoos can therefore hardly be called educational.
In his book: ‘Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals in Captivity’ Professor 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 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. Prof. David Ehrenfeld of Rutgers University states in Ethics on the Ark: "In many ways, the zoo has come to typify the themes of the Age of Control: exploration, domination, machismo, exhibitionism, assertion of superiority, manipulation.”
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries humans were frequently exhibited in cages with animals as part of an exotic collection of life forms. Dwarfs, bearded women and people with all kinds of deformities and oddities were exhibited for human amusement, forming part of the ‘us’ and ‘them’ distancing scenario.
Closer to home in the early 20th Century, Saartjie Baartman , a member of the Griqua tribe in the Eastern Cape, caught the eye of a visiting English ship’s surgeon who persuaded her to accompany him to England as a subject of medical and anthropological research. She was considered a freak because of her extraordinary enlarged buttocks and genital peculiarities, and after being put under scrutiny by the researchers, was exhibited like a wild beast in the streets of London, eventually being taken to Paris where she was handed to a “showman of wild animals” in a traveling circus. While moral progress compelled people to realize the wrongs of exhibiting humans, society is only now starting to comprehend the injustice of exploiting wild animals in zoos and circuses.
A possible parallel to Saartjie Baartman’s story is the well documented case of Jackie the Chimp who, torn from the wild, was kept in unbearable captivity and taught to do demeaning tricks for the patrons of Boswell Wilkie circus. He was subsequently given to the Johannesburg zoo in 1966 before eventually being passed on to Roodeplaat, the South African Defence Force’s covert Biological and Chemical Warfare facility. His Hveterinary history over the period of 10 years spent at the zoo shows that he was kept on drugs and tranquillizers for most of the time.
Like the majority of zoo animals who are denied a rich social life, their every need and instinct thwarted and in possession of complex minds, he’d developed zoochosis, a term used to describe various psychological problems, from stereotypic behaviour that includes rocking and walking in circles, to self mutilation and even infanticide.
The drugs on which Jackie was kept also raises disturbing questions about what zoos do to animals in their care in order to make them viewable objects.
According to Travers and McKenna of the Born Free Foundation over 60% of polar bears in British zoos are mentally deranged.
Alarmingly, zoos are not only breeding excessively, but this is an activity that is encouraged, particularly because young cubs and baby animals are more of an attraction and because animals bred in zoos are often sold for profit via dealers. This is how zoo animals end up in the pet trade, in circuses or experimental laboratories, as victims of canned hunts, or as breeding animals for the cruel wildlife trade.
Says Dr. Steven Best of the University of Texas: “The fact that, as insipid parents claim, their children might ‘enjoy’ the zoo is not an argument for it, but a disturbing indication of an early stage in the warping of a young mind.”
Indeed, a society that cages animals cages itself.
