Through a glass

Perhaps it is objectively true that only poetry can talk of birth and origin. Because true poetry invokes the whole of language (it breathes with everything it has not said), just as the origin invokes the whole of life, the whole of Being.

The mother orangutan has come back, this time with her baby. She is sitting right up against the glass. The children in the audience have come to watch her. Suddenly, I think of a Madonna and Child by Cosimo Tura. I'm not indulging in sentimental confusion. I haven't forgotten I'm talking about apes any more than I've forgotten I'm watching a theatre. The more one emphasizes the millions of years, the more extraordinary the expressive gestures become. Arms, fingers, eyes, always eyes...A certain way of being protective, a certain gentleness -- if one could feel the fingers on one's neck one would say a certain tenderness -- which has endured for five million years.[1]

-- from Ape Theatre by John Berger (1990).

Footnote

[1] More likely, the last common ancestor of orangutans and humans lived about 13 million years ago.

Captives

In [popular photography of wild animals], animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are objects of our over-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away we are.

-- from Why look at Animals? by John Berger (1977). In a zoo, he says, you are looking at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal.

Zoos of the mind

In "The Bauhaus of Nature"... Peder Anker argues that the architect intended his design to do more than delight:

'Using penguins as an example, [Berthold Lubetkin] argued that "the most unlikely animals seem to thrive under what would seem the most unnatural conditions [provided that they] gain freedom from enemies, regular food and general hygiene." The same would hold for workers and the poor who were in desperate need of being liberated from their "natural" condition of criminal and filthy slums...The health and welfare of people and animals were of equal concern, and the new architecture was to promote it.'

If the zoo seems an unlikely site of socialist ideology that's because it has come to be an unlikely home for any value but the conservation of wildlife; prevailing wisdom is that such a value isn't best expressed by geometric forms or large gray slabs or Victorian gables, but by design that mimics wilderness.

Yet there are exceptions: The Berlin Zoo's hippopotamus enclosure, built in 1997, is a tree-ringed lake covered by a soaring glass dome with a diamond-patterned support structure that undulates. In 2006, the New York Aquarium...launched a competition to redesign the exterior of its Coney Island home. The finalists included plans for a giant pink jellyfish with spiraling tendrils that create an open pavilion several stories high. The winning design reframes the structure with a long, tall fence that mimics the waves of sand and sea; a dune conceals an underground parking lot. (In 2008, the entire project was scrapped over costs and a decision to focus on interior renovations.) A Danish firm's winning design for the new Denmark Aquarium set to open in Copenhagen in 2013 is a giant pinwheel. It is based on biological flows: "the whirl streams of the sea, shoals of fish, and swirling starlings turning the sky black," according to the firm. Wilderness becomes, then, not the goal, but the inspiration.

-- from Jesse Smith on the architectural history of zoos

Zoo

Most of the animals on display in the UK’s largest zoological gardens are at the very lowest risk of extinction in the wild...Fewer than a quarter are classified as “threatened” on the [IUCN] Red List. Yet it is species conservation that dominates zoos’ ­branding – and the spur behind their revival seems to be that they have convinced punters that the price of a ticket buys them, not entry to a show, but a stake in the preservation of the natural world.

-- writes Peter Barber in What are Zoos for? Regarding their history:

The zoo was a powerful embodiment of the notion that not only had British culture been able to extend itself over the furthest reaches of the globe, but that it had “actually been able to bring the furthest reaches of the globe back to the centre of the imperial city”...Zoos as we know them today are relics of this earlier era of globalisation, in which not just people and spices were dispersed across the planet, but the natural world.

Barber more or less concludes that, whatever misrepresentations or manipulations zoos may or may not may make today, they are likely to play a significant role in future as 'arks'.

It sounds as if Radoslaw Ratajszczak faces a situation at Wroclaw Zoo a little like the one David Hancocks faced at the Seattle Zoo and the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in the '80s and '90s. See this from '97.

Lions of Gaza

Asaf Shariv, the Consul General of Israel in New York, claimed the tunnels connecting Gaza to the Sinai... were "as big as the Holland and Lincoln tunnels [in New York]," and offered as proof the "fact" that lions and monkeys had been smuggled through them to a zoo in Gaza. In reality, the lions were two small cubs that were drugged, thrown in sacks, and dragged through a tunnel on their way to a private zoo.

--Mark LeVine on Al Jazeera.

minus claws and teeth

Cruel but not unusual

Stress and lack of exercise are killing elephants in zoos.

Walrus the considerer

Sara the walrus and her trainer

Twisting the sinews

Martha Nussbaum thinks about animals in conversation with Alan Saunders (transcript).

Weighted balls that simulate struggling prey for tigers in zoos, contraception for elephants: yes, these (and much else in the discussion and her book) are worth serious thought -- not least that humans are hereby taking control of, or at least playing a key role in, not only the survival (or otherwise) of existing species but also their future evolution.

Natural selection -- including, for example, the evolution of faster and more subtle prey -- framed the tiger's fearful stealth and strength. What will a ball on a string, or a robot, do?

Plenty of what humans do has inadvertent selectionary pressures, of course. Propeller and artificial noise in the oceans, for example, has shrunk the auditory world of whales from hundreds or even thousands of miles into a 'tiny bubble' (says Christopher Clark as reported by Stephen Palumbi): in that case, we are 'selecting' for the diminishment or even the end of one of the world's greatest musical wonders.

As Stephen Palumbi has said, "it is time we started taking responsibility for our evolutionary actions. "