Post the piles of pachyderm
pooh we reached the Orang-utang enclosure, which was an unexpected
joy. There two Orang-utangs were gently and sympathetically gazing
through the glass of their enclosure at a young wheelchair based girl.
I know it may be fanciful, but you could feel their concern and love
as their eyes looked soulfully at her.
The fact that we have zoos poses some moral and ethical problems which
I am carefully going to ignore except to say, in their favour, that
they can lead to maintaining some species that are close to extinction
and also be educational and create a sense of wonder and care in their
usually young audience. Melbourne Zoo is incredibly well organised,
curated and tended and a great hit with the thousands of people, especially
kids, who go there every day. It is just a tad expensive, unless you
buy an annual family pass which gets you into, not just Melbourne,
but also the regional outliers.
Additionally zoos are not nearly as cruel as they used to be, where
animals accustomed to large amounts of space were once confined to
miniscule cages with concrete floors. Once again I look back to my
youth when we saw magnificent animals of prey solitarily confined
to narrow cells. They were prisons.
Mind you this was in the days when we also read books like ‘The
Man-eaters of Kumaon’ (1944) by “Gentleman Jim”
Corbett detailing his experiences from the 1900s to the 1930s, while
hunting man-eating Bengal tigers and Indian leopards. One tiger was
apparently responsible for over killing over 400 people, which was
fair enough if it wasn’t you. A bit like the fish and chips
conundrum where we eat thousands of sharks (aka flake) annually, but
get very upset if they take one unlucky swimmer or surfer per year.
Now there are hardly any tigers left in the wild and you see more
white pointers at a nudist beach than there are in the ocean.
We want zoos to be an impossible amalgam of Disneyland and David Attenborough,
colourful, charming and nice, where death never really happens and
all the animals and happy and terribly photogenic. But of course many
animals are carnivores and so rarely do we see them really behave
as they would in their real environments. Or what is left of it.
The best zoos have to be carefully managed environments and Melbourne
does a particularly good job (sometimes to excess) of raising environmental
consciousness. We would like to go and see Nature but there is precious
little left that is accessible and close. So we go to zoos to fulfil
what seems to be an elemental need to be connected.
Which leads me to the fact that there have been times when humans
have been kept in zoos as objects of curiosity. Often caged and seen
as inferior to the generally white Europeans who came in their millions
to peer at them. These sadly and peculiar displays reached their zenith
in the age of imperial colonialism in the 1870s where human zoos could
be found in Paris, Hamburg, Antwerp, Barcelona, London, Milan and
New York City.
The 1878 World’s Fair presented a Negro Village that was visited
by 28 million people, and the 1889 Parisian World's Fair, when the
Eiffel Tower was built, displayed 400 indigenous people as the major
attraction. The Colonial Exhibitions in displayed humans in cages,
often nude or semi-nude, the 1931 exhibition in Paris was so successful
that 34 million people attended it in six months.
Now there may be some excuse for in those days when film was not universally
pervasive and television unknown, but 34 million people in 1931 seems
downright perverse.
And yes, Australia was represented, with up to twenty Aboriginal people
being taken from northern Australia in the 19th and 20th centuries
to be exhibited alongside animals in these Human Zoos.
So tomorrow it is almost certain that we will go back to the zoo and
hopefully see the Snow Leopard that has remained in shy seclusion
until now.
And there will be no humans in cages or staged environments. If I
want to see them behaving badly I would just turn on Parliament –
now that is a zoo of the worst kind. |
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