[img]139|left|||no_popup[/img] On almost any Monday, you can find me at the Los Angeles Zoo. I unpack my big, suburban, all-terrain stroller, load up the little one and cruise on through Griffith Park. We look at the animals, take pictures, and after a couple of hours, drive on home.
As the caretaker of four (soon to be five) pets, and an occasional donor to the Humane Society, it’s pretty safe to say that I’m an animal lover.
This is where the zoo and I come into moral opposition. I find the whole thing horrific. Free roaming animal penned up. Animals that would otherwise graze or kill the right food for their diet are fed specially formulated “diets” of who knows what – “supplemented” for optimal health. Plus they just plainly look sad – especially the gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees. The zoos emphasize on almost every sign how much these Great Apes are like us, but don’t seem to recognize the depravity of keeping hominids in cages. (Although with our worldwide history of slavery, perhaps depravity is a human trait we can’t sublimate). For these reasons, I had stopped going to zoos when I got old enough to know what they were about – holding animals captive for human entertainment.
Could Be a Teaching Opportunity
Turns out, my moral opposition did nothing to close the zoos. A quick glance at the parking lot of the Los Angles Zoo, particularly on the weekend, tells me attendance is booming. Sadly, what could be, I suppose, an opportunity to teach humans about kindness, compassion, and the endangerment of species is instead subject to what I think of as “Disneyfication.”
Nowhere is this more evident than on the placards near the animal’s cages (or habitats, if you please). They are brief on facts, but high on jocularity. Conspicuously absent are facts concerning the effect of captivity on members of various species. Elephants (who have been the subject of much controversy at the L.A. Zoo) live for some twenty years in captivity, but they can live up to fifty years in the wild. Then there is the sheer number of animals, including some fifteen elephants that have died in captivity. Thinking of the scores of species that have shortened lives or fail to breed due to infertility (from their diets? or perhaps captivity?) is truly depressing. Who doesn’t remember the bated breath of newscasters discussing whether pandas were mating, inseminated, pregnant, or able to give birth to a live pup?
Unfortunately, the zoos know about the stresses of their “accommodations,” but push forward anyway. The newsletters and magazines I receive from the zoo, as a new member, don’t discuss the hardship of life in captivity. Instead, they choose to focus on the “preservation” effect of the zoo. By educating the public about these species, many endangered, like the Asian elephant, the zoo tells us that they are doing their part to assure continuation of these species.
So Why Did I Return to the Zoo?
I’m not convinced. I read a long article about one endangered species or another, but have yet to get off my butt to take action. Instead the millions of dollars spent to confine a few pandas or elephants, in “style,” could be spent on saving the many endangered animals in the wild – with habitat preservation, or education of those in proximity to these animals losing the battle against human encroachment. Somehow, I suspect, donating more money to the zoo would not likely be a step in the right direction.
Is visiting the zoo well-suited to educating a child about animals or compassion? Maybe. I’m back at a zoo again now that I have my own child. But I am concerned that the zoo may teach most children that species “different” from our own can be captured for our entertainment. We’ve have treated people this way in the past, and in our outdated “entertainment” society, we still treat animals this way. Where is that fine line between “education” and “entertainment?”
I say the line is crossed when you get churros and popcorn with your education. Movie snacks and concessions put the whole thing firmly in the entertainment camp.
I distinctly remember my horror at the Walt Disneyworld’s Animal Kingdom Lodge. It was billed as the African savannah right outside your room. At least there, no pretense was made. Animals were right on display for your pleasure. The park gave no wink or nod to preservation, education or habitat rehabilitation. Though more offensive to me, at least Disneyworld was honest in its profit-driven motive.
But when do you sacrifice your personal beliefs? For me, it turns out that the threshold, at least for this issue, is when I had a child. Whether I couch my capitulation in the best terms (I want to educate my child about species diversity), or the truest terms (being the stay-at-home-mom of an active toddler can be mind-numbing, and we need something to fill the long days), it is a capitulation nonetheless.
It’s a low bar that I’ve crossed and it makes me wonder what other principles I’ll throw under the bus in order to teach (or entertain) my child, or just to preserve my own sanity. Hopefully this is the last one. And hopefully, I can shape it to teach him. Not just about the animals in the cages, but about the ones who put them there.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
