Eccentric's Corner: The Zookeeper Who Roared

Some academics are unwilling to get their hands dirty. Not David Grazian. Fascinated by the ways we interact with “charismatic megafauna” (and their handlers) at zoos, he strapped on work boots to shovel goat pellets, pick donkey hooves, exercise rabbits, and, perhaps most challenging, wrangle human children and parents. What he discovered, and relates in his new book, American Zoo, is that in the Anthropocene era, “nature itself is a cultural construction organized by human imagination and experience.” Also: People say and do a lot of silly things when they’re face to face with wild animals.

You’d written books about nightlife and blues clubs for which you immersed yourself in those cultures. So then you had a kid and decided to write about the zoo?

I happened to be going to zoos every weekend with my son. But then I discovered how many similarities there are between zoos and those other spaces. Both are concerned with creating an audience experience and are particularly interested in myths and fantasies of authenticity.

You share a lot of anecdotes about the wrongheaded antics of zoo visitors, such as sneaking into animal enclosures.

We live at a remove from the animals we associate with the wild. And when we do experience the animal kingdom, it’s in a highly sanitized context of cuteness and anthropomorphism. As a result, I think people feel confident approaching animals: They have less of a sense of awe and respect, and think of wild animals as akin more to pets than to beasts that could rip their faces off. Keepers never go into enclosures with an animal like a cougar or a tiger unless the animal is locked away or sedated. But people don’t see that, and so some might feel as comfortable trying to feed an elk as they would a dog. It’s easy to see why kids do it. What was a surprise to me was seeing how their parents would encourage them.

When visitors see a “smiling” howler monkey, they assume it’s friendly, when it’s really being territorial. Thousands of years ago, wouldn’t we have known that? Do we think we know more about animals because we feel we should?

That argument, while potentially true, is nonfalsifiable. But even if that were the case, we’d still have to explain differences in how we respond to particular kinds of creatures. We see the world through a human gaze, and even when we sympathize with animals, we do so only through reading our own impulses onto them. So you have visitors who complain that the western lowland gorillas must be “so hot” on a 70-degree day—although most live near the equator in temperatures far hotter than anything here in North America.

And some visitors go away disappointed because so many zoo animals “don’t do anything.”

Lions are at rest 20 hours a day, but we interpret animals at rest as “doing nothing” as opposed to reserving energy. Sometimes we assume that an animal is bored or stressed out. But an animal that is bored or stressed paces back and forth. It doesn’t just lie out in the sun. I am convinced that one of the reasons panda bears are so popular is because they have to spend most of the day eating bamboo, so you’re constantly seeing them in activity.

Why do so many people stay away from zoos?

I talked to many educated people who don’t go to zoos because they find them disturbing. They’re not joining protests, but they feel an aversion. The way I see it is that zoos do what other types of institutions do but in a public way. About 750,000 animals, if you don’t count insects, live in American-accredited zoos. By comparison, we kill 10 billion animals a year on factory farms, 9 billion of them chickens. Most educated people know that animals are treated exceptionally poorly on factory farms. But slaughterhouses are not public places, and so people aren’t typically confronted with those realities of animal captivity. They’re only exposed to them at the zoo, and therefore the zoo becomes the target of their disapproval.

But you acknowledge that behind their constructed zoo environments, many animals reside in something much more like a traditional cage.

Yes, and many do really live in places that look like dungeons. Zoo Atlanta, for example, has one of the most celebrated gorilla habitats in the Americas. But for security reasons the gorillas can’t sleep outside, and so when you go behind the scenes you see they actually sleep in unadorned cages, and that’s not seen by the public. But they still obviously live in far more humane conditions than most captive animals in the United States.

You write about “rain forest” exhibits with animals from Africa, South America, and Asia put together in a way we’d never see in the wild. Do we see anything “real” at the zoo?

It depends on what you mean by real. For polar bears in Manitoba that no longer enjoy the wide terrain of ice floes they once did, and now feed on the garbage of tourists who have come to see them, that’s the real world. And when we talk about going “into the wild” today, we really mean going into an area that is fenced off and restricted by thousand-page books of regulations, and in which predator species are culled. Zoos and aquariums create stage sets for environments that don’t exist today, but I’m not sure people would want to see what “the wild” is really like, warts and all.

David Grazian is the author of American Zoo, A Sociological Safari. Princeton University Press ©2015

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