THE TRADITIONAL METHOD for capturing many social creatures, including elephants, gorillas, and chimpanzees, was — and, in some cases, is — to kill the mothers. Most of us never hear about this; much better to believe that zoos rescue animals from the wild. To hear the truth about how animals are captured would impinge on the fantasy that the eager ocelots and elephants are “waiting” to meet us. Zookeepers know this. They have always known it. William Hornaday, director of the Bronx Zoo, wrote in 1902 to Carl Hagenbeck, considered by many to be the father of the modern zoological gardens and a trader in animals on an almost inconceivable scale: “I have been greatly interested in the fact that your letter gives me regarding the capture of the rhinoceroses; but we must keep very still about forty large Indian rhinoceroses being killed in capturing the four young ones. If that should get into the newspapers, either here or in London, there would be things published in condemnation of the whole business of capturing wild animals for exhibition.”

If you are a mother, what would you do if someone tried to take your child? When you were a child, how would you have felt if someone shot your mother so they could put you on display? What would you feel as you poked at her, hit her, wanted her to wake up so together you could make your escape, but she did not awaken? What would you feel if they put you in a cage?

These are not rhetorical questions. What would you do? What would you feel?

ONE OF THE THINGS I dislike most about Western culture is the unexamined belief that humans are superior to and fundamentally separate from “the animals”; that animals are animals, and that humans are not animals; that an impermeable wall stands between.

In this construct, humans are intelligent. Animals — by which is meant all animals except humans — are not, or if they do have any sort of intelligence, it is dim, rudimentary, just sufficient to allow them to meaninglessly navigate their meaningless physical surroundings.  

Whereas human behavior is based on conscious, rational choices, our culture suggests animal behavior is fully driven by instinct. Animals do not plan, do not think. They are essentially machines made of DNA, guts, and fur, feathers, or scales.

Humans feel a wide range of emotions. Animals reportedly do not. They do not grieve the loss of a mother, of freedom, of a world. They do not feel sorrow. They do not feel joy. They do not feel homesickness. They do not feel humiliated.

This culture thinks that human life is sacred (at least, some human life is sacred, but the lives of the poor, the nonwhite, the indigenous, as well as the lives of any who oppose the wishes of those in power, are only a little sacred, or sometimes not sacred at all), but animal life is not sacred. In fact, the entire animate world is not sacred.

Humans are supposedly the sole bearers of meaning, the sole definers of value, the only creatures capable of moral behavior. Animals’ lives have no inherent value — indeed, no value at all, except insofar as value is assigned to them by humans. This value is almost always strictly utilitarian. Most often it is monetary, and usually it is based not on their lives but on the price of their carcasses. And, of course, animals are incapable of moral behavior.

Finally, this culture constantly stresses that all that is human is good: humans have humanity and are humane; the civilized are civil. Human traits are to be loved. Animal traits are to be hated — or, rather, hated traits are projected onto animals. Bad humans are “animals,” “brutes,” and “beasts.” My thesaurus lists as synonyms for animal: inferior, mindless, unthinking, intemperate, sensualist.

We are discouraged from anthropomorphizing animals — that is, we shouldn’t attribute human characteristics to them. This means that we must do everything within our power to blind ourselves to animals’ intelligence, their awareness, their feelings, their joys, their suffering, their desires. It means we must ignore their selfhood, their individuality, and their value entirely independent of our own uses for them.

WHAT DO WE really learn from zoos? We learn that we are here, and animals are there. We learn that they have no existence independent of us. We learn that our world is limitless, and their worlds are limited, constrained. We learn that we are cleverer than they are, or they would outwit us and escape — or maybe that they do not want to escape, that the provision of bad food and concrete shelter within a cage is more important to them than freedom. We learn that we are more powerful than they are, or we could not confine them. We learn that it is acceptable for the technologically powerful to confine the less technologically powerful. We learn that every one of us, no matter how powerless we may feel in our own lives, is more powerful than the most mighty elephant or polar bear.

We learn that “habitat” is not unspoiled forests and plains and deserts and rivers and mountains and seas, but concrete cages with concrete rocks and the trunks of dead trees. We learn that “habitat” has sharp, immutable edges: everything inside the electrified fence is “bear habitat,” and everything outside the fence is not. We learn that habitats do not meld and mix and flow back and forth over time.

We learn that you can remove a creature from her habitat and still have a creature. We see a sea lion in a concrete pool and believe that we’re still seeing a sea lion. But we are not. We should never let zookeepers define for us what or who an animal is. A sea lion is her habitat. She is the school of fish she chases. She is the water. She is the cold wind blowing over the ocean. She is the waves that strike the rocks on which she sleeps, and she is the rocks. She is the constant calling back and forth between members of her family, this talking to each other that never seems to stop. She is the shark who eventually ends her life. She is all of these things. She is that web. She is her desires, which we can learn only by letting her show us, if she wants; not by caging her.

We could and should say the same for every other creature, whether wolverine, gibbon, macaw, or elephant. I have a friend who has spent his life in the wild and ecstatically reported to me one time that he’d seen a wolverine. I could have responded, “Big deal. I’ve seen plenty in zoos. They look like big weasels.” But I have never seen a wolverine in the wild, which means I have never seen a wolverine.

Zoos teach us that animals are meat and bones in sacks of skin. You could put a wolverine into tinier and tinier cages, until you had a cage precisely the size of the wolverine, and you would still, according to what zoos implicitly teach, have a wolverine. 

Zoos teach us that animals are like machine parts: separable, replaceable, interchangeable. They teach us that there is no web of life, that you can remove one part and put it into a box and still have that part. But that is all wrong. What is this wolverine? Who is this wolverine? What is her life really like?

Zoos teach us implicitly that animals need to be managed, that they can’t survive without us. They are our dependents; not our teachers, our neighbors, our betters, our equals, our friends, our gods. They are ours. We must assume the interspecies version of the white man’s burden and, out of the goodness of our hearts, benevolently control their lives. We must “rescue them from the wild.”

Here is the real lesson taught by zoos, the ubiquitous lesson, the inescapable lesson, the overarching lesson, and really the only lesson that matters: that a vast gulf separates humans and all other animals. It is wider than the widest moat, stronger than the strongest bars, more certain than the most lethal electric fence. We are here. They are there. We are special. We are separate.

THE PRETENSE THAT humans are superior to nonhumans is entirely unsupportable. I have seen no compelling evidence that humans are particularly more “intelligent” than any other creature. I have had long and fruitful relationships with many nonhuman animals, both domesticated and wild, and have reveled in the bouquet of radically different intelligences — different forms, not different “quantities” — that they have introduced to me, each in his or her own time, in his or her own way.

Similarly, I have seen no evidence that animals do not plan, do not remember, do not hold grudges, do not squabble, do not have communities, do not grieve, do not feel joy, do not play games, do not make jokes, do not enjoy challenges, do not have fun, do not have morals, do not feel or think so many of the things that are so arrogantly deemed to be human traits. Indeed, I have seen all of these “human” traits in nonhuman animals.

An example: Late the other night one of my dogs woke me with his barking. I stood and looked outside. It was a beautiful full-moon night. I asked him to be quiet. He groaned and lay down. I went to bed. He started barking again. I got up again and asked him to be quiet. He groaned, walked in circles, and lay down. I went to bed. He started barking. I got up and yelled at him to shut up. He was quiet. The next morning he was gone. Later that day I walked to my mom’s house. He was there. He wouldn’t look at me. Normally he goes everywhere with me, but when we came home he demurred. It wasn’t until the day after that he would look at me, and even then it was only after several apologies and a bunch of dog treats. Slowly, he seemed to forgive me.

My refusal to stay up with my dog that night had no rationale; I had no appointment early the next morning, and it was a beautiful night. I don’t see how the fact that I can type on a computer keyboard makes me any smarter in this case than a dog who at least has the sense to play in the moonlight.

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