by Nils Lindahl Elliot
Why do hundreds of millions of people visit zoos each year?
Last weekend I came across an article in the New York Times that served as a reminder of a discourse that continues to have currency within the zoo industry, and apparently beyond. The article, which made repeated references to recent visitor research, suggested that people who go to zoos experience something akin to ‘wilderness memory’. ‘Just as dancers have body memory’, the author argued, ‘we have wilderness memory’. ‘The random gibbering and roaring, cackling and hooting, yowling and grunting strike ancient chords in us, a feral harmony that intrigues and lulls.’
The discourse in question is a soft version of biologism, the doctrine that everything in human affairs is ultimately a matter of a (biological) Nature. I use a capital ‘N’ in this case because the nature in question is a romantic and sublime one – very much the same nature constructed by those who, like Richard Louv, claim that ‘contact with nature’ is necessary ‘for healthy child – and adult – development’.(1)
In my research I’ve been critical of the doctrine of culturalism, which attempts to reduce everything in human affairs to culture(2). I’ve used the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, a realist philosopher, to insist on the importance of indexical links between certain representations and what they represent, or in the case of zoos, between the observer and the observed. But the vice of culturalism pales when compared to the ideology of biologism, and with it the uncritical naturalism that so often prevails when the time comes to explain cultural groups’ relations to nature (or whatever passes for nature), and to wild animals in particular.
Simplifying somewhat, naturalism involves an ascription of identity between a representation, a referent, and a certain conception of what the referent is really like(3). In the case of zoo displays, the ascription of naturalism is made complex by the fact that the animals on display are at one and the same time a synecdochic representation of a species, and ‘themselves’. Even so, the animals are often displayed within enclosures which are unambiguously representational in so far as they attempt to represent one or another habitat, one or another biome.
The author of the article in the Times does acknowledge that zoos are ‘not a natural world by any means’. But much of the rest of the piece is devoted to suggesting, in effect, that the reason why ‘we’ love zoos – a problematic ‘we’ if ever there was one – is that people treat the animals in zoos as unquestioned presentations of the real McCoy. This is tantamount to subscribing to what I describe as a hypernaturalistic understanding of the nature of zoo animals. The ‘hyper’ in ‘hypernaturalism’ refers to situations in which the representation is regarded as being so real that it is no longer treated as a representation – it is the thing itself.
As I began to explain above, in the case of zoo animals there is some justification for doing so – zoo animals are not best conceived as ‘representations’. But the peculiarity of zoo animals lies precisely in the ambiguity of their status as ‘re/presentations’ and as quasi-wild creatures. As I began to explain above, an animal displayed in a zoo can be regarded as being at once a presentation of itself, and a representation of something else: a species, or a ‘scene’ in a rainforest, a desert, a reef, etc. However, the animal ‘itself’ is not unambiguous from the point of view of its ontological status. Certainly a strong case can be made that many species displayed in zoos conserve most of their morphological and behavioural attributes, and this even after having been bred for generations in zoos. It would, in this sense, be absurd to suggest that there is no difference in ‘wildness’ between, say, a tiger and a sheep.
Even so, zoo animals are not truly wild animals if only because they are no longer living in the wild. Zoo animals are, well, zoo animals, whatever the continuities with their wild cousins. To put this point more generally, it would be a mistake to abstract the animals from their living, and breathing contexts – be it that of an original habitat, or a zoo. It is no coincidence that so much zoological research has been devoted to documenting the many transformations that wild animals undergo when placed in captivity. The transformations range from dramatic behavioural changes to subtle structural transformations (on occasion there are, to be sure, some not so subtle morphological transformations too: consider, for example, the collapsed dorsal fins of many captive orcas).
The more general point I am leading up to is that one can only subscribe to a biologistic explanation of why people go to zoos if one quite radically, even if implicitly overlooks the zooness of zoos. At the risk of seeming to state the obvious, whatever other motivations they may have, visitors go to zoos because zoos exist, and because a tradition exists that involves ‘going to the zoo’. In the space and time of leisure, there are a finite set of options that people have when it comes to leisure, and zoos are one such option, one that is familiar in every sense of the word. But familiarity is not itself necessarily a matter of biophilia. My research in two British zoos revealed that while many parents had serious misgivings about the zoos they visited, they continued to use them because zoos provided a relatively safe, and especially an entertaining place for their young children. The hesitation of such parents was often quite susceptible to the zoo strategy of talking up conservation and the ‘naturalistic’ nature of the enclosures; both aspects provided, as one zoo director acknowledged, ‘permission to visit’ an otherwise questionable kind of visitor attraction. Had another equally good or convenient option existed, many would have made use of it.
It may be assumed from my argument that I sympathise with animal rights discourses on zoos. In fact, I am concerned to explain, critically, what is an exceptionally complex leisure practice, and one which biologistic accounts do not do justice to.
I would add that, beyond simplifying the bio-social relations at stake, a romantic conception of a harmonious nature also makes it difficult to consider the myriad acts of cruelty, or attempted cruelty, perpetrated not by the zoos, but by a surprising number of their visitors, both young and older. As zookeepers know all too well, the barriers of enclosures are often designed as much to keep the wilder animals in as they are to keep the mischievous visitors out. Zookeepers might further point out that, ‘in the wild’, that ‘feral harmony’ that the NY Times article referred to is less than, well, harmonious.
Two last comments: uncritical accounts of naturalism also tend to produce a certain tunnel vision vis-a-vis the question of the relative naturalness of zoos as opposed to the kind of representations found on, say, television. The view of many zookeepers is that visitors go to zoos to experience the ‘real’ animals, as opposed to those ‘dwarfed, flattened, and interrupted by commercials’ (as expressed by the Times’ article). In fact, my research revealed that many visitors applied the opposite criterial hierarchy: real nature, or at any rate the real wild animals, were those found on the tele. Far from going to zoos to remedy the limitations of the media, zoos were often spaces where mass-mediated animals could be ‘seen again’, which is to say recognised (and ‘re-cognised’), but frequently on condition that the ‘real’ animals looked the same as those on television, i.e. on condition that they looked as if they were in the wild. The ‘frequently’ is an important caveat here, for often the most vivid encounters were those in which visitors came ‘face to face’ with the larger mammals; more of than not, this happened in enclosures which were not as ‘naturalistic’.
The last point to one side, this order arguably goes some way in explaining why zoos have developed forms of enclosure which frequently do little for the animals on display(4), but give visitors a sense of a continuity with the moving dioramas produced on television. The dilemma for the zoo designers is that this often means that animals have a certain freedom to roam far from visitors – a tendency that tends to be particularly frustrating to younger children, for whom a different order of naturalism often applied.
My last comment refers to the idealisation of the multi-sensual character of zoos. Zoos may certainly be palaces of multi-sensuality, and a case can be made that they have, for this reason, something of a comparative advantage vis-a-vis some other mediums. But any idea that this is itself an inherently positive aspect, and one that is naturally attractive is misleading, to say the least. Zoos have long been attacked for being ‘smelly’ – indeed the epithet of ‘smelly zoo’ has come to symbolise the distaste experienced by many zoo critics with respect to the older, so-called ‘Victorian’ zoos. Any effort to sublimate this dimension of zoos overlooks many everyday experiences of zoos in which smell is, if not an unpleasant aspect, certainly one that generates ambiguous responses. As I explained in an article(5) that focussed on this dimension of zoos, in the course of conducting ethnographic research with family groups at the Paignton and at the Bristol Zoos, it became apparent to me that especially the younger visitors had a very strong, and rather mixed reaction to the smells in the Paignton Zoo’s award-winning Marie Le Febre Ape Centre.
In most cases the reactions involved exclamations such as ‘Phew! It’s smelly Mummy!’ or as one older child put it, ‘They should use some air freshener in here!’ In a few cases there was a stronger response: four of the children refused to go into this, and indeed into any of the more pungently aromatic displays in either of the zoos where I conducted research. The parents of one family reported that one of their children had begun to wretch the first time that they entered the Ape Centre.
So much for a ‘subtle olfactory landscape that stirs us’!
Updated 17 February 2012
Notes
1) Richard Louv (2009) Last Child in the Woods, London: Atlantic Books, p. 2
2) Terry Eagleton (2000), The Idea of Culture, Oxford: Blackwell
3) Nils Lindahl Elliot (2006) Mediating Nature. London: Routledge
4) See for example, Vicky Melfi, Andrew Bowkett, Amy Plowman and Kirsten Pullen (2005) ‘Do zoo designers know enough about animals?’ in Plowman and Tonge (eds) Innovation or Replication? Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Zoo Design. Paignton: Whitley Wildlife Conservation Trust, pp. 119-128.
5) Nils Lindahl Elliot (2006) ‘See It, Sense It, Save It: Economies of Multisensuality in Contemporary Zoos’, Senses and Society, Volume 1, Number 2, pp. 203-224
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