Zoos are the opposite of educational: they construct fictions about their captives

[sl8]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/22/zoos-are-opposite-of-educational-they-construct-fictions-about-animals

The Observer

Zoos are the opposite of educational: they construct fictions about their captives

Martha Gill

Joanna Lumley’s call to free UK elephants has exposed flaws in conservation claims

Sun 22 Oct 2023 01.34 EDT

Every afternoon at London Zoo until the early 1970s a table laid with cups, saucers and a teapot would be set out for the chimpanzees. An amusing set piece was anticipated: chimps throwing crockery at each other and jumping on chairs. But there was an early complication.

Chimpanzees are exceptionally good at mastering tools. They quickly learned to use the pot correctly and would sit politely at the table, taking afternoon tea.

“When the public tea parties began to threaten the human ego, something had to be done,” Frans de Waal writes in Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?. “The apes were retrained to spill the tea, throw food around, drink from the teapot’s spout.” Being fast learners, they excelled at this, too – establishing a routine with comic flair, popping the cups in the teapot when the keeper’s back was turned. The ruse worked. Contemporary newspapers reported the animals behaving with their “usual unselfconscious abandon”.

The chimps had done something unnerving in those early days. Their display of competence challenged not only the egos of their audience but the very premise of the zoo itself. If animals were capable of sense or even sensibility, this collection of cages and cells might start to look a little sinister. Less like innocent entertainment, perhaps, and more like a sadistic sort of prison. It was in the interest of zoos to teach customers the opposite lesson. The zoo became a place of fiction, a sort of anti-educator. It couldn’t quite tell the truth about the animals it housed.

[...]

- Martha Gill is an Observer columnist

[cachukis]

1. I have been studying Frans de Wall for

sometime.
After listening to trump long before his election, I determined he was a person of vengeance. I opined to myself, that vengeance was a human construct. It came about with the evolution of human society as did the imagination of a supreme being.

I have been hunting to find examples of vengeance in higher thinking animals and while there are responses in tigers, elephants and apes of fatal responses to transgressors, my unscientific findings are that they are defensive more than predatory.

Chimpanzees that have murdered members of their tribe have immediately sought reconciliation. Their fatal actions were emotional rather than vengeful.

There is a case where a tiger sought out a person who had killed another tiger. I contend it was a chance to eliminate a potential killer rather than a vengeful response.

Zoos are opportunities to discover much about those who share our planet. When they become more than that, we have lost our way.

[CrispyQ]

2. Wish I could rec this a hundred times.

Everyone should take the time to read this article. I haven't visited a zoo in decades & have resigned myself to the fact that they will be the last of these types of animals.

[Wonder Why]

3. So do my vegetarian neighbors make victims when talking about their vegetable gardens

They talk about how well their plants are growing but when the plants spread beyond the garden lines, they are ripped out and left to die in the sun or used to create food for the other vegetables, converting them into cannibals.

Instead of humanely killing them before consuming, they rip fruits and vegetables from their mother plants and consume them while still alive, sometimes right in front of their mothers. Even when cooking them, they often don't humanely kill them but instead, for "freshness", immediately throw them into a pot of boiling water and watch them slowly suffer.

The worst of it all is that they not only let their children watch such horror but teach their kids to do it themselves.

So one can legitimately say: Vegetarian gardeners are the opposite of educational: they construct fictions about their captives