Even though I've lived in or around Denver for four years, last week was the first time I've been to the zoo.
"He has a thing against zoos," is what my wife would tell you.
And I do, though my thing is not "free the animals" (as you might expect) but rather a discomfort with the whole enterprise.
The origin of this discomfort is an essay by the critic John Berger that I read over a decade ago.
Because the outlines of his argument have gone fuzzy in my brain over the years, I dug out his collected writings About Looking from my bookcase and reread the essay.
The family visit to the zoo is often a more sentimental occasion than a visit to a fair or a football match. Adults take children to the zoo to show them the originals of their "reproductions," and also perhaps in the hope of re-finding some of the innocence of that reproduced animal world which they remember from their own childhood.
The animals seldom live up to the adults' memories, whilst to the children they appear, for the most part, unexpectedly lethargic and dull. [...] And so one might summarize the felt, but not necessarily expressed question of most visitors as: Why are these animals less than I believed?
And from later in the essay:
The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in the zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically. They have been immunized to encounter, because nothing can any more occupy a central place in their attention.
I think Berger is right about that expectation of encounter that we bring to the zoo.
But the animals have no such expectation—immunized, to use Berger's word, to the setting itself.
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