Zoo Story
April 12, 2010 by Charles Siebert
Just down the street from my Brooklyn, N.Y. apartment, there once lived a rhinoceros named Rudy. If you entered the Prospect Park Zoo through the side entrance, just behind the park’s still functioning, century-old wooden carousel, Rudy was your very first encounter, standing there on his small grassless patch of city the way rhinos everywhere and for millennia have stood: two black, pin-point eyes peering out of dirt-caked armor, the horned head drifting heavily an inch or so above the earth.
I first met Rudy back in the late 1950s, when my parents took me to the zoo as a kid from our little brick row house a few neighborhoods away. In truth, Rudy was never much of a draw — rhinos being, I suppose, entirely too unanimated to look at for very long. Yet I found Rudy that much more enticing: a stillness to aspire to; a breathing part of prehistory; sensate stone. Among my first orders of business upon moving into this neighborhood some 20 years ago was to run down the block and find Rudy right where I’d left him, the lone rhino blankly blinking amidst high-rise apartments and swirling city sounds.
Often in the course of my afternoon walks through Prospect Park I’d stop along the zoo’s barred perimeter and look directly into Rudy’s sunken, walled-in enclosure. I’d stand there, waving, making noises, trying to take the measure of his ken. I wondered if police sirens startled him, if he noticed the songs of the city’s starlings and sparrows in the surrounding trees, or if he ever swayed to the sound of the carousel’s slow, sad calliope. And then late one hot spring night, the entire neighborhood was stirred by the awful sounds of screaming and gunshots coming from the zoo grounds.
Two boys, the newspapers reported the following day, had climbed over the zoo’s outer perimeter fence and decided to take a swim in the polar bear’s moat. By the time the police arrived to the scene, they found the bears pawing at the limp body of one of the boys. Thinking that he might be still alive and that the other boy might be hiding somewhere else inside the enclosure, the police lifted their shotguns and killed the polar bears. A short time later, the news came that the zoo was closed for renovations. A sign posted out front noted that most of the large animals were being permanently relocated to other, more spacious, theme-park-type facilities around the country.
“And the rhinoceros?” I asked the woman who answered my phone call to the zoo’s administrative offices.
“You mean Rudy,” she said. “He’s leaving tomorrow for a better life in the suburbs of Michigan.”
In the area where Rudy once stolidly stood, a family of wallabies now hops about through wavy wands of savannah-like grasses. Behind them is a simulated hillside shot through with tunnels, large and small, so that kids can get up close and personal with a colony of prairie dogs. Farther along, past where the elephants and the hippos and the different bear enclosures used to be, one comes to heart of the old zoo. The grandly ornamented Beaux Arts Ape, and Lion, and Reptile Houses are still there, arranged in a circle around the central seal pool, but all the “Animal City’s” original inhabitants are long gone. Where once the big apes, cats, and snakes languished in the stinky equivalent of tiled subway bathrooms fashioned with little more than a token log or a vine swing for entertainment, I now find glassed-in dioramas, brightly lit and entirely odorless, featuring more easily contained creatures like spider monkeys and capuchins, iguanas, voles, and meerkats.
There was a certain innocence about the old-style zoos. It was as if we were so thrilled then just to have wrangled the animals here into our world that simply giving them room and board seemed enough to us. Now, however, we’ve come to know too much about the likes of Rudy and the others — both the increasing diminishment of their natural homes and the previously unimaginable complexity of their brains and social interactions — to responsibly keep them in such crude quarters any longer.
Indeed, a number of zoos and aquariums across the country have now decided to relinquish animals like elephants, chimpanzees, and whales. Numerous new studies show that these species share numerous brain structures with our own — and, like us, also suffer severe stress and psychological trauma from prolonged confinement and social isolation. Such trauma can cause these creatures to act out in erratic and often violent ways, as it can with humans. The examples have become all too numerous. Last year, Travis, a chimpanzee raised to live in a home in Stamford, Connecticut, brutally attacked and disfigured the neighbor of his longtime owner. A few years earlier, a former circus elephant named Winkie lashed at out and killed her handler at a Tennessee-based sanctuary for traumatized captive elephants. In increasing numbers, dolphins captured and confined for “Dolphin Assisted Therapy” programs at swank resorts are attacking and attempting to drown the very humans whose traumas those dolphins were originally “recruited” to help heal. In February, an orca named Tilly killed one of her trainers at San Diego’s Sea World.
As I stood the other day by the zoo’s seal pool — the seamless, body-long presses of the seals through water somehow countervailing their own confinement — I couldn’t help but question the continued keeping of any of the creatures there. Why discriminate against them just for appearing to be eminently more “keepable.” The essential premise of the old zoo was that the inhabitants were the representatives of an extant and still thriving wilderness, unwitting emissaries brought here to grant us a deeper regard and respect for their true home. That notion was always a specious one; it seems ever more so today, when the zoo animals’ actual homes essentially have become fenced-off nature dioramas: outsized versions of the very sorts of suburban-wilderness theme parks to which the likes of Rudy were long ago dispatched.
Some years ago, I was offered a private tour of the then nearly finished indoor tropical rainforest facility at the Bronx Zoo. My guide, Alan Rabinowitz of the New York Zoological Society, a long-time field biologist who’d spent most of his career in the jungles of Belize working to save some of the planet’s last remaining jaguars, led me past a series of noiseless, climate-controlled dioramas, wistfully pointing out the exhibit’s painstakingly exact replications of the jaguar’s natural home, right down to the hoary vines and carefully painted lichen on the papier-mâché rocks. Just outside the facility’s exit, a digital counter displayed the world’s rapidly disappearing acreage of rainforest.
“Our hope,” a clearly ambivalent Rabinowitz said as we watched the numbers dwindle, “is that facilities like this one will make people work to save the actual place.” He paused a moment and then sighed. “Or perhaps it will just keep them coming back here.”
We have reached a truly a topsy-turvy juncture in the long tumultuous history of our relations with the wild. Once, we needed to bring the animals into our civil environs to remind us of the wilderness we’d walled ourselves off from. Now, however, we have so successfully encroached on and dominated that wilderness that we must plant its remaining inhabitants in our midst, fenced off from us. When the wild becomes the theme park, why have zoos at all?
Charles Siebert is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and is the author most recently “The Wauchula Woods Accord: Toward a New Understanding of Animals.”
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58 Comments
What do you think? Leave a comment
April 16, 2010 by Hmf
I've never liked zoos. Every time I looked into a cage at the inhabitant, all I could think was they had been sent to prison in a very tiny cell that was never kept clean and was always rank to the nose. I felt pity. I never went to a zoo again.
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June 28, 2010 by MEM
iknow exactly how you feel. but zoos arent entirly bad. They can also be to key survival to some animals because they have no chance in the wild. But it would be nice to make their zoo homes more open so they can show their true color instead of being traped..... Small animals have great homes in zoos but the big animals are traped they cant even run.
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November 5, 2010 by olivia
i know what you mean i feel that way to so bbbyyyyyy i love the zooo its so fun
February 1, 2012 by Claire Mulhall
but what about the animal's natural instinct????
July 8, 2010 by kelsey
i kon wat u mean i dont go 2 da zoo cause they think its thier real home but its not they been take away from thier real family and ported here 2 entertan us
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August 16, 2010 by Brittinie Wanamaker
I do agree with you on that. But again we wouldn't learn about them and the things they do at different times.. for example giving birth. I think that's a good example.
August 7, 2010 by jenna
i think the same thing zoos i go there thinking all the animals would have a good home but when i go there it smells like a junk yard
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October 16, 2010 by aveyon
if it seem like a junk yard the whole word can clean it up
December 18, 2010 by chelsea
yah their poo is every where its disguisting!!
November 25, 2010 by prscilla
well i dont think that because those animls aminals could be endagered so i would rather them be in the zoo instaed of being hurt
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December 18, 2010 by nikki
i love wild animals
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December 18, 2010 by beck
yah me to they r so cool
April 30, 2011 by nancy
I went to a zoo in Tucson Az. It was wonderful ,the animals had a lot of room to run around not caged up free to move around.
February 5, 2011 by lindy
ye i know,i hate zoos becuase thay are torchoring the animals.every animal wants freedom like people.just think of youl locked in a stinky filthey cage.animals want to cry some times but thay cant.thay wish we could do something,and we can,help make a change with zoos,atlesed give them a good home on earth.everyone wants to be happy.so do they.zoos do not know how much pain thay are giveing animals,it is up to us to make a change,i know youl do.i love animals.and i know some were in youls heart youl do to.lets make a change with zoos,ok everyone.
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April 19, 2010 by sm
My brother and I went to the zoo about 15 years ago and we were having a good time until we came to the orangutang exhibit. His "habitat" was all concrete with jungle jim bars and some ropes and visitors looked down into his cage. So a bunch of us were standing at the fence looking down and he was just sitting there looking up at us with the most human eyes. It was like I could feel what he was feeling and thinking "why am I in this place?" My heart broke and I had tears running down my face, I looked over at my brother and he was crying too. We left the zoo and never went back. Neither of us have ever taken our children to the zoo either. I firmly believe that wild animals need to stay wild and be left alone by humans.
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September 7, 2010 by Allie
But... they aren't left alone. Most of the animals in zoos aren't captured. They're bred.
They're habitats are being destroyed. And if our zoos don't exist, they may stop existing all together.
Did you know most zoos have species rival programs and breeding programs?
I volunteered at a zoo that had such a program for black footed ferrets, and without this program, they would've gone extinct.
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November 5, 2010 by olivia
hahahahahahahah thtas cool i gusee
September 14, 2010 by dan
If all animals are out of sight they will also be out everyone's mind which means no money for conservation. It always amazes me that people in the large cities always want to protect the "wilds" but have no idea what is need to protect these places. Zoos are one of the few windows into these areas. I would agree that a lot of zoos need to be brought up to more modern standards, but they are very important in getting people interested in the plight of animals. Also as there is no room for a lot of animals in the wild zoos should also be used as away of increasing the gene pool of some animals.
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October 16, 2010 by aveyon
what had happen u can not kill just take care of it ok i love aniamals like that do not hurt the porw animals
July 7, 2010 by Ava
Everytime I had to go to the zoo for a field trip or something, I would see these beautiful creatures sitting in these metal cages. Sure they were fed and all but they didn't have the room to move around. I have always wanted to help these poor creatures but I don't know what I could do to expand their cages.
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July 8, 2010 by kelsey
i argee wit u wit all my heart an soul they should be lefth alone in their real ture homes wit they real ture familys
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July 9, 2010 by Judy Denton
This is something I think about a lot. Why don"t we just leave these animals in the wild where they belong in the first place? Have you ever taken a good look at their faces at the zoo when you've been to one really, really close up? Complete despair.
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July 10, 2010 by Vicki
I use to feel that way as all of you. But when you go behind the scene tour you see that they do much more than throw them in a cage. They rescue many animals from situations far more worse than the zoo . They are fed regularity and alot of the animals have trainers that love them very much. They are also treated when they are sick So I would say to all who think the zoo is a terrible place try the backstate pass and really see some of the other things they do for these animals many in some cases would of died in the wild..Try the truck that takes you out to get close up and feed the rhinos and other beautiful animals. It is wonderful.
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July 17, 2010 by Allen Nyhuis
Sorry, but I basically skipped the paragraphs about zoos in the 1950s -- because those zoos do not exist anymore. The Brooklyn zoo (Prospect Park) described in this hit piece article is nothing like the zoo is this text. It is now a bright and modern place where its animal residents thrive. While this author likes to describe zoos as "animal prisons", the real truth is that (most) zoos are animal resorts, where their residents are well fed, cared for, protected, and loved. In most cases, they are far better places to live than out in the wild, where they are subject to the dangers of predators, disease, lack of food, habitat destruction, pollution, and poachers.
Quite honestly, there are many animal species which would no longer exist, if not for the efforts of American zoos. One is the beautiful Arabian oryx, a desert antelope from the deserts of Jordan and Israel. The Phoenix Zoo (and later others) literally saved this species from extinction. More familiar to USA residents is the American bison, or buffalo -- the animal on the reverse of the old "buffalo nickels". The next time you see a buffalo, thank your local zoo.
Allen Nyhuis, Coauthor: America's Best Zoos
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July 24, 2010 by Isabel
Most of the animals in zoos have never been in the wild to begin with so you can't really say that they have been taken away from their real homes. I wish people would do their research before dogging zoos. None of the animals living in zoos would even survive if they were "released" into the wild. That would de doing those animals an even bigger injustice; kicking them out into a world where they have no way to survive
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July 26, 2010 by J.L.L.Whew Whew LooseArrow Sr.
To me I don't think the Golden or Bold Eagles should be in the Zoo. Let them go and enjoy there freedem like they should. Let them do what they need to do give them to us we need them in our Tribal Lands everyday.Some of us the NATIVE when we go to the Zoo as we pass by the EAGLES they know who we are and they want us to set them free by the sound they make or by the way they look at us you can see there tears. But we can't I wish I could let them go free. I believe all you NATIVE feel the same way.
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July 27, 2010 by Madeline Rodriguez
Recently I took a trip with my grandson to Puerto Rico and i took him to the zoological Park Which is called Parque De Las Ciencias in Bayamon Puerto Rico. I Was in total shock of what i saw there the abuse they have with the animals is unbeleivable they live in filth , sick ,no food it broke my heart I was told there was another zoo at the other side of the Island that there was a lot of animal cruelty going on is there some where or somebody i can talk to or call to investigate this kind of cruelty to animals it is horrible please ,please let me know if there is somebody i could reach about this situation Thanks
madeline rodriguez
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July 30, 2010 by William D. Renfer
I don't agree with caging or restricting the habitat of wild aninals, however if there are wild aninal preserves, they should be spacious enough for the animals to have a complete habitat that is naturat to their species. I agree with the comments that animals have feelings and sences just as humans do. The bible quotes that man has domunion over the anmals. That does not mean that we have any reason to mistreat or abuse them in any way. There are spaces throughout this country where reserves could be set up and people could be escorted to view the aninals in their natural habitat which would be more pleasing for all. Wild animals are ment to be free and should be treated that way. Respectifully, Bill Renfer-
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July 30, 2010 by William D. Renfer
I don't agree with cag'ing or restricting the habitat of wild animals, however if there are wild animal preserves, they should spacious enough for the wild animals to have a complete habitat that is natural to their species.I agree with the comments that animals have feelins and sences just as humans do. The bible quotes that man has dominium over the animals. That does not mean that we have any reason to mistreat or abuse then in any way. There are spaces in throughout this country where reserves could be set up and people could be escorted to view the aninals in their natural habitat which would be more pleasing for all. Wild aimals are ment to be free and should be treated that way.
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