The huge black bear patrolled the edge of the water, pacing menacingly back and forth. Perhaps he was protecting a smaller bear slumped against a rock shelf behind him. No one said much. A baby squealed; a man flicked a cigarette butt which fizzled out in the moat. The bear paid not the slightest attention to either. He paced on, back and forth, until you noticed that on each and every pass he made his great feet landed in the exact same rhythm on the exact same spots. You could see that those particular slabs were worn pale with repetitive use. Far from being menacing, this bear was bored out of his skull. It was a classic case of a repetitive-movement syndrome exhibited by animals whose condition of unnatural entrapment has utterly crushed their spirits.
It was London Zoo in 1979, and
I’ve loathed zoos ever since. Many have improved on the cramped, sterile
quarters I saw that day, but many have not. Over the years some zoos have
developed sophisticated scientific rationales for still keeping animals
imprisoned, but I’m seldom convinced. Some try to breed endangered species,
others characterise themselves as “orphanages” or “sanctuaries” devoted to saving the animals
from yet worse confinements. There’s something in that; but ... I visited a Big
Cat Sanctuary in the US, where a black jaguar rescued from a circus paced its
cage with the same repetitive motion of the London bear. Hopefully it was en
route to something better, though he could never be wild again. Even in the
Sanctuary’s bigger, more vegetated pens, a solitary serval was clearly stressed
by the visitors peering in and making stupid kitty-kitty noises, which would
have been interpreted by her as threats.
Just about all the world’s
animals are now entrapped or constrained by human activity in some way, whether
by “park” fences and walls and roads, by snares or gin-traps or bullets or
hooks or strychnine, cages or garden fences, collars and chains, by the destruction
of habitats and food sources, by the interruptions of migration routes on land
and air and sea, by the intrusive sounds of shipping and airliners and
chainsaws and wind farms, by the ravages of the wildlife trade that Vanda
Felbab-Brown calls the “extinction market”. Less intentionally, perhaps, human
activities have laid down a planet-wide, finely-meshed net of intrusion,
poison, disease and deprivation that subtly but lethally affects even the most
remote colonies of Antarctic penguins and the plankton-eaters of the deepest
ocean trenches.
But zoos are a peculiarly
self-serving variety of anthropocentric animal confinement.
It dawned on me that my bookshelves
harboured a number of literary works concerning zoo animals. What does this
literature have to say about the phenomenon?
Speaking of black panthers, it feels appropriate to start with Rainer
Maria Rilke’s famous poem, “Panther” (here in my own translation from the
German, which naturally I prefer to anyone else’s):
His eyes are so tired now that
they observe
nothing beyond these circling
bars:
to him, no furnishings but a
thousand bars,
and behind the thousand bars,
no world.
His supple grace, elastic and
contained,
pacing and pacing his shrunken
ring,
is a dance of power about the
dying
centre where a massive will
stands drained.
Just once, or twice, the
curtained pupil
is soundlessly unveiled – an
image gleams,
glides through that intensity
of limbs –
and in the silence of the
heart, is stilled.
Says it all, I think.
As Eric Baratay and Elisabeth
Hardouin-Fugier richly chronicle in their big book, Zoo, the history of zoos is a long one, entangled with the
development of human power over the natural world, through increasingly
powerful technology and the urbanisation that alienated many from nature. For
centuries wild animals were captured for human entertainment, collected by or
gifted amongst potentates as reflections of their power and self-regard. So
rarely seen were some of these animals that they were walked literally across
continents and became celebrities. At what psychic cost to the bound and
chivvied animals one can only guess.
Michael
Allin relates just such an epic trek, by a giraffe whom humans named Zarafa. Zarafa (1998) is an historical account –
Allin conceived it as a novel but found the facts quite compelling and
colourful enough. By 1824, when Zarafa (the Arabic word from which ‘giraffe’
derives) was born and captured in the Sudan, 17th-century ‘cabinets of
curiosity’ and the European elites’ 18th-century ‘menageries’ were giving way
to less artificially designed ‘gardens’, later to be termed ‘zoological
gardens’ – zoos. Colonial conquests were making more exotic specimens
available, and after the French Revolution the gardens were increasingly taken
out of aristocratic hands, democratised and commercialised. Muhammed Ali of
Egypt’s gift of a giraffe to Charles X of France was a bit of a throwback,
then, entangled with the aftermaths of Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt. Also, the
zoological sciences were becoming professionalised, and an actual ‘scientist’, Geoffrey
Saint-Hilaire, was assigned to make sure the poor animal survived the 500-kilometre
walk from Marseille to Paris. She did, despite what must have been the
terrifying noise of enraptured crowds all along the route. She died in 1845,
and remains, stuffed, in the museum at La Rochelle. Zarafa is a lively period-piece, though less about the giraffe’s experience
than about the human culture she found herself entrapped by.
The same
might be said about a parallel story, J M Ledgard’s Giraffe (2007). Here the year is 1975, and a team of Czechs are in
Africa capturing a whole clutch of giraffes to be shipped to Prague, home to
one of the more prestigious European zoos. Colonial-style plunder continuing,
in effect. The novel begins with a section related from the giraffe’s point of
view, a tricky thing to pull off, especially when the giraffe starts naming
boats and countries and relaying conversations translated from the Czech. There
are only a couple more short such passages, however; the novel is otherwise
about the humans’ journey into a country undergoing a kind of identity crisis
as part of the “Communist moment”. The animals have to be transported by barge
through West Germany, an ideologically unsettling experience for the crew.
Among the latter is a Saint-Hilaire figure, a haematologist: how do giraffes pump blood all that way up to their brains? After all
this, little is learned; the giraffes are really just pawns in games of
commerce, theatrics, and national pride – a sordid cocktail of motives
governing most zoos ultimately. But the verbal flesh Ledgard puts on these bare
bones is extraordinary: poetic, haunting, unflinching. The fate of the giraffes
likewise: a grievous echo of Cold War paranoias about zoonotic pandemics – and prescient,
given the more recent Covid outbreak.
Most zoo animals are fated to be obtained by violence and to die behind bars. A few may be born in captivity; even fewer escape. But escape they will – like the tiger in South Africa recently that had finally to be shot by its ‘owner’/captor. Conservation value of all that: zero. Some inmates may be liberated by compassionate humans. This is the theme of Russell Hoban’s delightful and quirky Turtle Diary (1975), in which an ill-matched couple hatch a plot to liberate two turtles from London Zoo, and release them into the ocean at Polperro on England’s south coast. The unlikely thieves are deftly portrayed in the film of the book, by Vanessa Redgrave and Ben Kingsley. (I went on a Hoban pilgrimage to Polperro, disappointed to find that this was clearly not where the film ended up, charming though it is.)
Another
escape story, even more fantasial, is Nancy Farmer’s children’s novel The Warm Place. I’ve written about this
elsewhere, so here will just say it involves a group of talking animals
conspiring, with the help of one small human, to escape a North American zoo
and get back to Africa. (Indeed, if you Google lists of zoo novels, the vast
majority are children’s stories.)
A reverse sea-borne journey is described in Yann Martel’s magnificently odd novel, Life of Pi (2003). This might be explored in the colonial/postcolonial context, too, since the eponymous Pi is son to a zoo owner in Pondicherry, India, mimicking the dynamics of Western zoos. (Not that India doesn’t have its own venerable history of capturing and taming wild animals, notably elephants.) Pi’s Indian zoo has proved commercially unviable, however. As Pi puts it, zoos have become pretty “precarious ... neither big enough a business to be above the law nor small enough to survive on the margins. To prosper, a zoo needs parliamentary government, democratic elections, freedom of speech ...” (Tell that to the Chinese, who have many zoos, some of them reportedly horror-shows – notoriously for Zimbabwean baby elephants, gifted in mediaeval potentate-style to President Xi.) Pi tries to suggest that zoo animals, when adequately treated, are content to settle into conditions safer than the wild. Puzzlingly, many still try to escape. In the novel, the animals are not freed but shipped across the Pacific to other zoos in North American. Unfortunately, the ship goes down in a storm, leaving Pi stranded on a lifeboat with a few animals, including an orang-utan, a zebra, a hyena and the tiger. It’s a microcosm of wilderness, and a mocking echo of the Ark (which some zoos also call themselves). After all the cruelty, terror and deprivation, Pi is nevertheless rather miffed when ‘Richard Parker’ the tiger finally walks away from him without a backward glance. So would all wild animals, given the chance.
One more big cat, in local context.
Henrietta Rose-Innes’ fine novel Green
Lion (2015) is set in a
slightly-futuristic Cape Town, centred on the remnants of a zoo alongside Table
Mountain (fenced off as an enclosed reserve). One of two zoo lions has mauled
its keeper; the second, of course, eventually absconds, to become the elusive,
almost mythical terror of local urban civilisation. There are echoes here
perhaps of Nadine Gordimer’s short story, “A Lion on the Freeway” (1980), whose
setting is haunted by the roar of lions in the nearby zoo – tragic precisely
because there is no lion on the
freeway, reclaiming his country.)
Zoos, I hazard, are first and foremost venues of ‘power-over’ rather than ‘power-for’, places where the ‘wild’ can be trammelled and effectively subordinated to human society, consumed only in digestible bits, decontextualised, infantilised. Arguments that the public are fruitfully educated by viewing captive animals are flimsy, argues staunch and controversial anti-zoo writer and literary scholar Randy Malamud, notably his book exploring a swathe of older literary works entailing zoos, Reading Zoos. A very short version can be found in an article, aptly named “The Captivity Industry”. It is co-authored with elephant-activist Gay Bradshaw, who has also been involved in efforts to move a destitute elephant out of less-than-ideal conditions in Pretoria Zoo. That environment minister Barbara Creecy seems slow to act, and the Zoo proprietors are recalcitrant, exemplifies the subordination of the animals’ well-being to commercial self-interest and legalistic obstructionism. They haven’t absorbed the lesson and emotional burden of our Arja Salafranca’s sensitive poem, “The elephant is unhappy” – a sadness read, as with Rilke’s panther, in pure body language.
I’m not
presenting a fully-worked argument about the value of zoos here, but it seems
significant that all the works cited seem to valorise the animals’ escape.
(Maybe I unconsciously self-selected, of course.) But given that humans have wiped out at least
half of non-human animal life since 1970, it is clearly human incursion on the
rest that needs to be caged.
Oh, but AI robots will take
over from humans soon, and they’ll have no need for nature, animals, potable
water, functioning ecosystems, or anything else! Or would they?
******
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