New Zoo Same as the Old Zoo

My Trip to My Local Zoo

The last time I went to the zoo I was a teenager, rocking out to the recently-released, debut album of Guns-n-Roses. It's been a while. After writing a tough post on the very concept, I decided to accept my mother's invitation as part of my first vacation in decades. The zoo had recently been renovated and the reviews were positive. I don't want to be a hypocrite or ignorant or anything like that so I went. I didn't want to, but I did.

This is the very first picture I took when I entered the zoo. It is a beautiful statue of an idealized moment between an imagined family of plastic giraffes. The state bond issued by popular vote for the improvements certainly left money for aesthetics and commerce; Mom pointed out the new gift-shop's massive upgrade in size and scope. I took note of the food-court turned restaurant. It was early and I was hoping for some popcorn or a hot-dog. The old zoo had popcorn and hot-dogs right when you walked in. The new zoo had everything from a quesadilla to a vegan garden burger. But an hour after the gates opened, the restaurant remained closed. I went hungry.

As I said about my last visit, the staff does their best to keep the inmates clean and fed. Although I noticed more space was available to them, it is far from enough. We saw the savanna-themed pen, the lion's backyard, the rhino's corner, and the primate apartments. It wasn't easy moving through the park. I admit to spending the briefest of moments at each attraction. Looking into their eyes was hard.

My heart sank when I saw the polar bear, pacing in circles. It soothed itself through the cooping mechanism of repetitive motion while my fellow visitors and I witnessed this troubling reality. Polar bears walk miles everyday in a frozen landscape and never see the same thing for long. This year's Noble prize winners show how specific cells within the hippocampus fire when we are in a certain place while different ones fire when we are in a different place. They call it the brain's GPS. What does this poor bear's GPS look like? He was born here. He'll die here. For an animal with a brain specialized in vast, endless spaces, he is simply looking for something new, something he will never truly see. 

Why must they serve a life-sentence? What if it was illegal to keep a wild-animal who could otherwise return to the wild?

We finished with the reptile house, big-cat dens, and the giraffe barn. I come away from the experience unchanged in my views and a little more jaded by the whole thing (my hippocampus suffers the specifics). Through tech, we are becoming more aware of other cultures and ideas. From marriage equality to the facts of smoking, things are improving because we have more information, more experience of what works and why. How much longer will we hold to old ideas and institutions that not only do not work but cause harm? Tech has solved so many problems. When will it solve this one? Zoos are not sanctuaries nor rehabilitation centers and should never be. Instead, let the future promise to rid us of zoos and provide something better.

Let us flip the script. Instead of holding animals in real-life cages with virtual scenes painted on the walls, let us enter the virtual cage with walls painted in real-life. Imagine walking into an exhibit and being virtually transported to some far-off place where you can walk among the creatures in real life and real-time, only you're not really there. Sanctuaries, national parks, and rehabilitation centers are perfect for this. Don't think video cameras and microphones everywhere. Instead, thousands upon thousands of unobtrusive, high-tech sensors paired with an advanced computer system will eventually have the capacity to copy the four-dimensional scene all the way down to the individual movements of every blade of grass. Initial investment is high but so are profits for everyone, especially the animals and scientists.

Until a zoo like this is available, I think the next time I see animals such as these, it will be on safari, where the only cost my visit will pose to them will be the sound, smell, and pollution of our vehicle.

On a brighter note, my initial reaction to the SCOTUS non-ruling ruling or read the full post.