Thought To Exist In The Wild

Awakening From The Nightmare Of Zoos

Writer Derrick Jensen and photographer Karen Tweedy-Holmes are both longtime contributors to The Sun. After they met through the magazine, the two discovered a shared interest in animals and ended up collaborating on the book Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening from the Nightmare of Zoos (No Voice Unheard), which we’ve excerpted here. Text © 2007 by Derrick Jensen. Photographs © 2007 by Karen Tweedy-Holmes.

— Ed.

THE BEAR TAKES seven steps, her claws clicking on concrete. She dips her head, turns, and walks toward the front of the cage. Another dip, another turn, another three steps. When she gets back to where she started, she begins all over. This is what’s left of her life. 

Outside the cage, people pass by on a sidewalk. Parents stop strollers until they realize there’s nothing here to see. A pair of teenagers approach, wearing Walkmans and holding hands; one glance inside is enough, and they’re off to the next cage. Still the bear paces; three steps, head dip, turn.

My fingers are wrapped tightly around the metal railing outside the enclosure. I notice they’re sore. I look at the silver on the bear’s back, the concave bridge of her nose. I wonder how long she’s been here. I release the rail, and as I walk away, the rhythmic clicking of claws on concrete slowly fades.

Unfortunately most of us by now have been to enough zoos to be familiar with the archetype of the creature who has been driven insane by confinement: the bear pacing a precise rectangle; the ostrich incessantly clapping his bill; the elephants rhythmically swaying. But the bear I describe is no archetype. She is a bear. She is a bear who, like all other bears, at one time had desires and preferences all her own, and who may still, beneath the madness.

Or at this point she may not.

ZOO DIRECTOR David Hancocks writes: “Zoos have evolved independently in all cultures around the globe.”

Many echo this statement, but it isn’t quite true. It is the equivalent of saying that the divine right of kings, Cartesian science, pornography, writing, gunpowder, chain saws, backhoes, pavement, and nuclear bombs have evolved independently in all cultures around the globe. Some cultures have developed zoos, and some have not. Human cultures existed for scores of thousands of years prior to the first zoo’s appearance about 4,300 years ago in the Sumerian city of Ur. And in the time since the first zoo, thousands of cultures have existed with no zoos or their equivalents to be found.

Zoos have, however, evolved in many cultures, from ancient Sumer to Egypt to China to the Mongol Empire to Greece and Rome, on up the lineage of Western civilization to the present. But these cultures share something not shared by indigenous cultures such as the San, Tolowa, Shawnee, Aborigine, Karen, and others who did not or do not maintain zoos: they’re all “civilized.”

The change of just one word makes Hancocks’s sentence true: “Zoos have evolved independently in all civilizations around the globe.”

Civilizations are characterized by cities, which destroy natural habitats and create environments inimical to the survival of many wild creatures. By definition, cities separate their human inhabitants from nonhumans, making it a challenge for urban residents to establish daily, neighborly contact with wild animals. Until the onset of civilizations — for 95 percent of our existence — this contact was central to the lives of all humans, and to this day it remains integral to the lives of the “uncivilized.”

If it can be said that relationships form us, or at the very least influence who we are, then the absence of this fundamental daily bond with wild, nonhuman others will change our sense of self, how we perceive our role in the world, and how we treat ourselves, other humans, and those who are still wild.

IF YOU SEE an animal in a zoo, you are in control. You can come, and you can go. The animal cannot. She is at your mercy; the animal is on display for you.

In the wild, the creature is there for her own purposes. She can come, and she can go. So can you. Both of you can display as much of yourselves to the other as you wish. It is a meeting of equals.

And that makes all the difference in the world.

One of the great delights of living far from the city is getting to know my nonhuman neighbors — the plants, animals, and others who live here. Although we’ve occasionally met by chance, I’ve found that it is usually the animals who determine how and when they reveal themselves to me. The bears, for example, weren’t shy, showing me their scat immediately and their bodies soon after, standing on hind legs to put muddy paws on windows and look inside; or offering glimpses of furry rumps that disappeared quickly whenever I approached on a path through the forest; or walking slowly like black ghosts in the deep gray of predawn. Though I am used to their being so forward, it is always a gift when they reveal themselves, as one did recently when he took a swim in the pond in front of me.

Robins, flickers, hummingbirds, and phoebes all present themselves, too. Or rather, like the bear, they present the parts of themselves they want seen. I see robins often, and a couple of times I’ve seen fragments of blue eggshells long after the babies have left, but I’ve never seen their nests.

These encounters — these introductions — are on terms chosen by those who were on this land long before I was: they choose the time, place, and duration of our meetings. Like my human neighbors and friends, they show me what they want of themselves, when they want to show it, how they want to show it, and for that I am glad. To demand they show me more — and this is as true for nonhumans as it is for humans — would be unconscionably rude. It would destroy any potential our relationship may once have had. It would be unneighborly.

I am fully aware that even a young bear can kill me. I am also fully aware that humans have coexisted with bears and other wild animals for tens of thousands of years. Nature is not scary. It is not a den of fright and horrors. For almost all of human existence, it has been home, and the wild animals have been our neighbors.

Right now, worldwide, more than 1 million people die each year in road accidents. In the United States alone, there are about forty-two thousand traffic fatalities a year. Yet I am not afraid of cars — though perhaps I should be. Around the world, nearly 2 million people per year are killed through direct violence by other people. Almost 5 million people die each year from smoking. And how many people do bears kill? About one every other year in all of North America.

We are afraid of the wrong things.

I’M AT A ZOO. Everywhere I see consoles atop small stands. Each console has a cartoonish design aimed at children, and each has a speaker with a button. When I push the button, I hear a voice begin the singsong: “All the animals in the zoo are eagerly awaiting you.” The song ends by reminding the children to be sure to “get in on the fun.”

I look at the concrete walls, the glassed-in spaces, the moats, the electrified fences. I see the expressions on the animals’ faces, so different from the expressions of the wild animals I’ve seen. The central conceit of the zoo, and in fact the central conceit of this whole culture, is that all of these “others” have been placed here for us, that they do not have any existence independent of us, that the fish in the oceans are waiting there for us to catch them, that the trees in the forests stand ready for us to cut them down, that the animals in the zoo are there for us to be entertained by them.

It may be flattering to believe that everything is here to serve you, but in the real world, where real creatures exist and real creatures suffer, it’s narcissistic and dangerous to pretend nobody matters but you.

SOMETIMES I FANTASIZE about imprisoning zoo advocates and zookeepers to give them a taste of their own medicine. I would confine them for a month and then ask if they were still eager to make jokes about the pacing monkey they call “Jogging Man.” I would ask them if they felt grief, sorrow, resentment, and homesickness, and if they still believe that animals do not need freedom. I wouldn’t listen to their answers, though, because I would not care to hear about their experiences. In fact, I wouldn’t believe that these zookeeper animals — for humans are animals, too — could meaningfully experience the world, which means it would be a projection on my part to believe they had anything to tell me. Indeed, it would be a  projection on my part to believe these animals might wish a certain condition to continue or change.

I would leave the human animals there, in their cages, and I would ask them these questions again in a year. During that time they would never be allowed to speak to another human, but they would be given cardboard boxes and paper bags to play with. I think that after twelve months of confinement they would tell me they agreed that animals need freedom. But I would not listen to them. I would not believe they could speak. I think that in time they would no longer tell me anything at all; they would silently walk around their cages — their “habitats” — taking seven steps forward, dipping their heads, turning to the left, and back again.

IT IS OFTEN SAID that one of the primary positive functions of zoos is education. The ending to the standard zoo book uses elevated language to state that because the earth has become a battlefield with the animals losing the war, zoos really are the last hope for beleaguered wildlife. Only through unleashing the full potential of zoos for education will people ever learn to care enough about wildlife not to destroy the planet. As author Vicki Croke puts it, the challenge for zoos is “to allow living, breathing animals to inspire wonder and awe of the natural world; to teach us that animal’s place in the cosmos and to illuminate the tangled and fragile web of life that sustains it; to open the door to conservation for the millions of people who want to help save this planet and the incredible creatures it contains.”

Have you watched people at zoos? I see no awe and wonder on their faces. Instead I hear children laughing at the animals — not the sweet sound of innocent laughter, but the derisive kind you hear in the schoolyard: the laughter at someone else’s misfortunes. I see parents and children giggling at the fat orangutan, making scary faces at the snake, ignoring the pacing bear. They shriek at the silly monkeys who pick their noses and stare straight through the glass at them. The children laugh and pound on the window. 

Even if we accept at face value the claims for the educational potential of zoos, study after study has shown that zoos fail miserably at this task. A tally of observation periods at the London Zoo found that spectators stood in front of the monkey enclosure for an average of forty-six seconds. These forty-six seconds included time spent reading — or, rather, skimming — the information posted about the animals. Not surprisingly, studies show low retention rates: even while patrons are in the zoo, standing directly in front of the animals in question, they consistently fail even rudimentary nomenclature questions: they still call gibbons and orangutans “monkeys”; vultures “buzzards”; cassowaries “peacocks”; otters “beavers”; and so on.

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