Zoo exhibits.

Billy Pilgrim. Christopher McCandless.

I’m never quite comfortable at the zoo. Maybe that’s because I belong there too. As a child I was taught to respect all the creatures of nature; voyeuristic entertainment seems something less than that. We are told it is humane, but with the exception of the slaughterhouse, nowhere are animals more obviously not-human than the zoo. 

A woman slaps her palm against the glass, demanding attention, acquiescence. One baboon signaling to another. But she’s outside the cage, and that puts her in control. I tell her to stop. She asks, “why?”  

What’s the difference between a zoo and a prison, really? I think about this as I watch the orangutans holding hands, sadly staring through the bars at the back of their enclosure. There are the usual rhetorical culprits: better quality of life, educating the public, saving endangered species. No doubt they are good-intentioned and morally defensible. Then comes the thought experiment: would we be willing to accept the same conditions? Perhaps a benevolent alien currently watching the earth boil over might soon offer a similar way out, giving us all the chance to become Billy Pilgrims. Maybe it’ll be Elon Musk instead, punching tickets to Mars. 

We don’t need to head to another planet to experience our own exhibition, however: we’ve developed the social media-industrial complex for that. The baboons can’t bang on our cages, but we can do that for each other just fine. It’s disingenuous to completely equivocate the two—but only slightly so. 

At some point we traded nasty, brutish, short lives for what we call civilization; we might equally call it a kind of self-domestication. We’re fascinated by how mating in captivity has changed us, among other aspects of modern social life, making a scientific inquiry into our similarities with the Discovery Channel. But one look at a pug is all it takes to realize how domestication can fuck you up. 

Reducing the zoo to its cages is uncharitable. It’s also essentially accurate. We’ve grown accustomed to our own enclosures, however, and so it doesn’t seem so bad. We wouldn’t want to be released back into the wild, the defense goes. We’ll die out there. And so those who have lived their entire lives in captivity are all agreed: the zoo, for us and for them, is a good thing.