The Mythical Zoo: Animals in Myth, Legend, and Literature

The Journal of Popular Culture, 1973

Literature has often been fascinated with the idea of the zoo as a microcosm, an endangered artificial ecosystem, a place where animals can be ‘rescued’ from the dangers of a more and more humanised environment and, ultimately as a mirror image where human beings could contemplate their own real face reflected in the imprisoned animal’s behaviour, melancholic attitudes, neuroses. Zoos also become a metaphor for oppression, solitude, confusion and heterogeneity, as well as infractions of one’s own private sphere – animals become attractions, spectacles to be gazed upon with sympathy, scorn, disgust, or a mix of all. In writers like Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, Giovanni Arpino, Vladimir Majakovsky, to name but a few examples, zoos are places of social and cultural rebellion, afflicted by role-reversals between humans and animals, or utopian microcosms. Satire is quite prominent in zoo narratives too: for example, in Zoschchenko’s novella The Adventures of a Monkey (1945) a chimp escapes from a zoo but, after experiencing the hardships of the soviet regime, surrenders herself gladly to her original cage. This chapter will focus on a fictional corpus centred on the theme of the zoo, trying to demonstrate how the consolatory identification of the animal with human traits is ultimately misleading. The range of texts and fragments, instead, offer a challenge to human conscience, its inconsistencies and lack of inclusion of the marginalised more-than-human in a co-evolutionary discourse and a more comprehensive outlook on our post-human reality.

ere dragons real? Can squirrels sail? Do bears rape people? Taken out of context, such questions seem a bit ridiculous. The answer seems both illusive and obvious: No. To distill literary tales about animals into such simple questions about truth and fiction risks missing their point: they focus on the wrong parts of the story, fixate on the literal embedded in the metaphorical. Yet we start here to offer an incitement we think useful at this critical moment for those of us studying human entanglements with animal lives in the past: what would it mean to answer yes? What is historical in fiction? And what is fabulous in history? What is the role of fabulous animals in historicallyminded critical animal studies?

The international protest surrounding the Copenhagen Zoo's recent decision to kill a healthy giraffe in the name of population management reveals a deep moral tension between contemporary zoological display practices – which induce zoo-goers to view certain animals as individuals, quasi-persons, or friends – and the traditional objectives of zoos, which ask us only to view animals as specimens. I argue that these zoological display practices give rise to moral obligations on the part of zoos to their visitors, and thus ground indirect duties on behalf of zoos to their animals. I conclude that zoos might take on interspecies friendship as a new zoological objective.

2018

Ethnobiology and Conservation

Currently there are many interfaces that allow the relationship between humans and animals, including zoos. Throughout history, the change in zoo structure has accompanied the social and cultural changes of human society. Nevertheless, despite the remarkable progress since early zoos were organized, there is still a great need for improvements of zoos around the world. A critical look at the relationship between humans and animals that led to the establishment of zoos was the aim of this study. Zoos currently follow some precepts (entertainment, education, research and conservation), however has not been enough to bind changes in zoos that still lack in accomplishing these pillars. Such lacks create a scenario for discussions between those who believe in the potential of conservation projects developed by zoos and those who find hostile and inadequate to animal life. It can be suggested that the bedrocks were the result of how human beings have perceived animals over time, since perception interferes with the way people deal with what surrounds them. In this way, the merely utilitarian vision of prehistoric times came from the perception that people had about animals at that time. Understanding the evolution of people's perception of animals and how this perception has influenced the configuration of zoos can tell us the directions they can take from now on. We believe that the next step is to turn our attention to the visitors, not only to meet their leisure expectations, but for them to become allies in the fight for biodiversity conservation.

This short piece tells the story of the Israeli occupation through the relationship between two zoos: the Biblical Zoo in Jerusalem and the Qalqilya Zoo in the West Bank. Despite the insistence by all interviewees that the zoos’ animals exist beyond the contentious politics of this place, this essay demonstrates that the two zoos are deeply entangled in hegemonic relations. The Israelis have the animals, the professional means, and the education. And as they give, take, and educate their Palestinian counterparts, they also create and enforce the proper conservation standards, thereby controlling the meaning of care for zoo animals, both in Israel and in Palestine. In effect, the Israeli gaze penetrates beyond the formal Israel/Palestine border. Instead of a straightforward story about sustaining wildlife, the control of zoo animals is a form of postcolonial ecology: an indirect penetration of the nation-state through nongovernmental means and in the name of conservation.

This book takes a unique stance on a controversial topic: zoos. Zoos have their ardent supporters and their vocal detractors. And while we all have opinions on what zoos do, few people consider how they do it. Irus Braverman draws on more than seventy interviews conducted with zoo managers and administrators, as well as animal activists, to offer a glimpse into the otherwise unknown complexities of zooland. Zooland begins and ends with the story of Timmy, the oldest male gorilla in North America, to illustrate the dramatic transformations of zoos since the 1970s. Over these decades, modern zoos have transformed themselves from places created largely for entertainment to globally connected institutions that emphasize care through conservation and education. Zoos naturalize their spaces, classify their animals, and produce spectacular experiences for their human visitors. Zoos name, register, track, and allocate their animals in global databases. Zoos both abide by and create laws and industry standards that govern their captive animals. Finally, zoos intensely govern the reproduction of captive animals, carefully calculating the life and death of these animals, deciding which of them will be sustained and which will expire. Zooland takes readers behind the exhibits into the world of zoo animals and their caretakers. And in so doing, it turns its gaze back on us to make surprising interconnections between our understandings of the human and the nonhuman.

Zoo Biology, 1995

2. The development of educational programs supported by the collection that are solution oriented. Recycling, intelligent resource use, and the importance of slowing the growth of human populations would be far more important lessons than identifying 30 species of exotic animals or even knowing that rhinoceros are endangered. The threat to all life is through ecosystem destruction and abuse. It is only through educating some portion of the visitors we see annually that we will have any lasting impact on conservation. 3. Applying the interests of the educated public and the ability of zoological gardens to garner conservation funds for the restoration, management, and protection of habitats-habitats that supply the birds for our collections-as this will be a more common truth than the reverse. We in the zoological community have a vested interest in the survival of diverse ecosystems. They are the bank for things that provide us with an income and a mission. Now, for the sake of our institutions and our own desire to maintain our sophisticated style of life, we must stop planning and start implementing. On a global scale, the problems are clear and not in need of a great deal more study: the human population must stop its exponential growth and the thoughtless destruction of habitat. Our collections can draw attention to these issues, and our educators can plant the seeds of change. As in San Diego, it may be years before these seeds sprout, mature, and bear fruit, but it can happen.

2015

This article points out central historical themes in the debates and arguments given by the directors of Copenhagen Zoo for the zoo as an alternative to nature. When Copenhagen Zoo was founded in 1859, its purpose was divided equally between entertainment, enlightenment and symbolizing the glory of the Danish capital. During this period though, it also became possible for the zoo to stage itself as a kinder place for animals than “real” nature. In the early 20th century, the zoo attracted attention from animal rights movements, wherefore the debates came to be structured around two radically different perceptions of nature. The article takes its outset in the arguments formulated by the three successive directors: Julius Schiøtt, Waldemar Dreyer and Theodor Alving.