Barry Lopez on zoos

    Are zoos a good thing? Barry Lopez gave interviewer William E. Tydeman this answer:

    John Berger has an essay about zoos -– “Why Look at Animals?” –- that was a seminal piece for me. One thought at its center is that zoos are the last vestige of colonialism. I was so struck by that, by his own ethical stance. He put into words what had become over the years more and more and more distressing for me about zoos. Like most American kids, I went to zoos when I was young, and I liked being there I guess –- I don’t remember. But as I grew older, I didn’t want to be anywhere near them. The argument that zoos introduce children to wild animals has virtually no credibility for me, because children today are introduced to so many things through special effects, through carefully edited and manipulative television programs, that the living animal standing there in a box doesn’t have as much authority as it once did. The reasons most often given for zoos to exist are specious to me. The idea that they function as gene pools is misleading. Very few species in any given ecosystem can survive in captivity and produce animals capable of going back and repopulating an area. Most ethologists subscribe to the idea that an animal learns its behavior by growing up in a certain environment. An animal isn’t a car, fine-tuned in a garage somewhere, that you then put out on the street. That’s not how animals work. So the two major arguments for the existence of zoos –- that they educate and that they’re a bulwark against loss of diversity -– neither of those seems good to me. If you banned zoos, it would force people who really want these animals to survive to face the fact that we’re going to have to leave them be in the places where they live and go to whatever length is required to visit them. And that has to mean limited visitation. I think what would happen, though, if you banned zoos, is that wild animals on their native ground would be forgotten. The strongest argument for zoos is that they’re the one place civilization provides where animals can come to sing for their supper. Until we achieve another sort of Enlightenment, they are going to have to do this to survive. I have to ask you to excuse me on this. I’m barely rational when it comes to zoos.

    (Quoted from page 109 of Conversations with Barry Lopez, by William E. Tydeman. University of Oklahoma Press, 2013.)
    For a brief biography of Barry Lopez, click here. For images of or relating to Barry Lopez, click here.
    William E. Tydeman is an archivist in the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University.