I paid a visit the other day to The Prospect Park Zoo, my local – spent the better part of a Sunday afternoon there with the wallabies, and the prairie dogs, and the meerkats. The very names of the animals just invoked underscore how much the place has changed from the zoo I knew as a kid growing up in Brooklyn. Gone are the lions and tigers and bears of yore, as well as the great apes, elephants, hippos and the rhinoceros with whom I had developed a particularly close bond.
I remember calling the zoo’s administrative offices years ago when I first learned that the place was closed for renovations into the more child-friendly, petting-zoo-type facility it has now become, a renovation that was, somewhat ironically, hastened by the awful misadventure of a couple of neighborhood kids one hot spring night back in the late 1980’s. Looking for a break from the heat, two boys climbed over the zoo’s outer perimeter fence and decided to take a swim in the polar bear’s moat. Nearby residents heard awful screaming and called the police. By the time they arrived they found the bears pawing at the limp body of one of the boys. Thinking that he might be still alive and that the other boy might be hiding somewhere inside the enclosure, the police got shotguns and blew the bears away.
“And the rhinoceros,” I asked the zoo administrator who informed me that all the old zoo’s large animals had been shipped away.
“Oh, you mean Rudy,” she said. “He’s living a better life now somewhere in the suburbs of Michigan.”
Whether or not Rudy thinks his life is truly any better in the suburbs than it was here in the high-windowed teem and thrum of the city is a question I’ve often pondered in the years since his relocation. All that remains now of his former Brooklyn home is the central shell of the old-style city zoo, the “wild-animal metropolis” of grandly ornamented Beaux Arts ape and lion houses wherein the animals once languished in the stinky equivalent of tiled subway bathrooms fashioned with little more than a token log, a vine swing, or a shallow moat to simulate their true homes. Those edifices remain but inside now they’re all brightly lit and entirely odorless, a series of glass-paned nature dioramas featuring more easily contained creatures like spider monkeys and capuchins and snakes and voles and meerkats.
Still, as I made my way to the side of central seal pool, the only essentially unchanged feature of the old zoo—perhaps because the seamless, body-long presses of seals through water somehow seem to countervail their very confinement—I couldn’t help but question the continued keeping of any of the creatures there. Why, I asked myself, discriminate against them and interrupt their natural days just for being eminently more “keepable” than the old classic inner-city-zoo residents are; for being, well, mere kats?
The larger question, of course, is why keep and look at animals at all anymore. The essential premise of the old zoo was that the inhabitants were the unwitting representatives of an extant wilderness, unwilling emissaries, in a sense, of an otherness for which these few co-opted and confined beings teach us a deeper regard and respect. That notion was always a specious one, but ever more so today when the very wildernesses that the old zoo inhabitants were to represent have now essentially become fenced-off nature dioramas; outsized versions of the sorts of suburban corporate wilderness theme parks to which the likes of Rudy were long ago dispatched.
It is truly a topsy-turvy juncture in the long tumultuous history of our relations with the wild. Whereas once we brought its inhabitants into our civil environs as proximate, palpable reminders of a vast realm that we left behind and walled ourselves against, our dominion over that realm has now extended to the point where we need to fence it and its remaining inhabitants off from us and then, either via nature documentaries or wilderness safaris, go visit them there.
