Not real animals at the zoo
by Derrick Jensen
A child who goes to a zoo is not encountering real animals. Like any other spectacle, like any other pornography, a zoo can never really satisfy, can never really deliver what it promises.
Zoos commit at least four unforgivable sins. First, they destroy the lives of those they cage. Second, they destroy our understanding of who and what animals and habitats really are. Third, they destroy our understanding of who and what we really are. And fourth, they destroy the potential for mutual relationships, not only with those particular encaged animals but also with those still wild. . . .
Everything is far worse than I am making it seem. Zoos – like pornography, like science, like other toxic mimics – take a very real, necessary, creative, life-affirming, and most of all relational urge and turn it – pervert it – until it furthers not fully mutual relationships at all but instead superficial relationships based on domination and control.
Indeed, zoos – like pornography, like science, like other toxic mimics – can cause people to forget those original relational urges, to forget mutuality is possible, to forget depth is possible, to believe control is natural and desirable.
. . . . Zoos take the creative need for participating in relationships with wild nonhuman others and simplify it until our “nature experience” consists of spending a few moments looking at – or simply walking by – insane bears and angry chimpanzees in concrete cages.
This is an excerpt of an excerpt of Derrick Jensen’s Thought to Exist in the Wild with photos, including the above, by Karen Tweedy-Holmes (“No Voice Unheard, 2007) as reprinted in Geez 06, Summer 2007.
Comment
Questions? Comments? editor@geezmagazine.org
These are very strong words you write against zoos. Zoos are not like porno, science or toxic mimics. That is really not fair. You are not giving zoos fair representation. It would be good to know just how zoos operate in the first place. And last of all please explain the last paragraph. It makes no sense.
— Amanda · Jun 22, 08:36 PM · #
I couldn’t agree more! Thanks Derrick for your incredible insight on the zoo…in all of us. You have really summed up life in general and why we are in the mess we’re in.
— Brenda · Jun 26, 10:20 PM · #
If you are going to post articles such as this perhaps you should post arguments, not assertions. This sounds like something a second grader would write (a second grader who protests ‘too loudly’ against pornography…it was mentioned three times in this brief excerpt). Though I agree that some zoos are wicked in their practices, and that, in an ideal world zoos would be unnecessary (as they do create an artificial environment), I am also aware of many people who have spent their entire lives attempting to better the lives of these creatures in an effort to raise public awareness in order to conserve as much wildlife as possible. Damn those people, right?
— Tripp · Jul 10, 02:29 PM · #
Hmmm, last time I checked, man was the top dog around these parts. If, since the dawn of time man gets to eat animal flesh, and wear their skins-why not put a few animals on display to educate, and inform on just what is out there in our animal planet? Now, why dont you get your “paws” on a playboy to see what real porn is.
— Gardner · Jul 17, 07:51 AM · #
Wow! Take an axe and grind away. Of course, if you grind hard enough you lose your point and destroy your axe. Zoos compared to pornography? Nonsense.
— MAGGIE · Jul 19, 03:17 PM · #
Interesting. Contrary to the above post, I thought it was a startlingly appropriate metaphor.
I had my first ‘lay-down-a-tent-by-random-creekbed’ camping experience last summer – phenominal. Spent the day navigating downstream on a raft constructed from driftwood and old rags, and wondered at the sheer magnitude of refreshment and vitality it was to just exist alongside nature… reveling in the joy it was to live as we were (probably) intended to.
— Justin · Aug 3, 11:12 AM · #
Right on. I would add that the Pet Industry should be included.
What’s with this human desire to turn wild, “exotic” animals into objects to fulfill our neediness?
I volunteer at a facility struggling to deal with just some of the costs of human love as it is expressed towards parrots:
www.worldparrotrefuge.org
— Grant · Aug 6, 10:33 PM · #
I’m in shock. I can’t believe that he called Science a “toxic mimic”. There is a no more twisted and inexcusable expression of dogma than anti intellectualism. It’s just stomach turning to me.
As for Zoos, its important to understand that “freedom” is a human political construct. wild animals live a life of constant fear and uncertainty, zoo animals live one of boredom and predictability, which one is better?
— Kevin · Aug 14, 08:43 PM · #
Wow… I have to say that I kind of agree about zoos. For me, zoos represent a counterfeit of the beauty God created in the wild, and animals in zoos are a little heartbreaking for me.
However, I’m concerned to see this slant aimed at science. In the right hands, science can be a means of honoring creation by understanding it better. And would you say that medicine, is a wicked counterfeit of reality? I would say that it is a way of expressing the value of the life we have been given.
— Danielle · Sep 15, 01:08 AM · #
Way to go Geez on including Derrick Jensen! He is one of my absolute favorite writers. I hope you include more of his in the future!!!
— Maria Drews · Oct 22, 04:58 PM · #
the only bad thing here is that you didn’t include the whole article.
thank you.
— heidiann(e) · Jan 23, 06:40 PM · #