#zoo

Taken together, the narratives of how the animals ended up at Lowry Park revealed as much about Homo sapiens as they revealed about the animals themselves. The precise details—how and where each was born, how they were separated from their mothers and taken into custody, all they had witnessed and experienced on their way to becoming the property of this particular zoo—could have filled an encyclopedia with insights into human behavior and psychology, human geopolitics and history and commerce. Lowry Park’s very existence declared our presumption of supremacy, the ancient belief that we have been granted dominion over other creatures and have the right to do with them as we please. The zoo was a living catalogue of our fears and obsessions, the ways we see animals and see ourselves, all the things we prefer not to see at all. Every corner of the grounds revealed our appetite for amusement and diversion, no matter what the cost. Our longing for the wildness we have lost inside ourselves. Our instinct to both exalt nature and control it. Our deepest wish to love and protect other species even as we scorch their forests and poison their rivers and shove them toward oblivion. All of it was on display in the garden of captives. ↗

— Thomas French

#captives #lowry-park #wild #wildness #zoo

I hate zoos. ↗

— Laurie Anderson

#i #zoos

It does get old to have to always be a monkey in a zoo. I don't know what it's like any more to be anonymous. ↗

— Kevin Bacon

#anonymous #any #does #get #i

Someone told me it's all happening at the zoo. ↗

— Paul Simon

#me #someone #told #zoo

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other. ↗

— Angela Davis

#break #convert #dangerous #designed #each

I didn't want to do a zoo show. I didn't want to do a study of someone with mental illness. I just wanted to show someone who was trying to live their life. ↗

— Daniel Craig

#illness #just #life #live #mental

Zoo animals are ambassadors for their cousins in the wild. ↗

— Jack Hanna

#their #wild #zoo

The letters of my name are scrambled like eggs. They should be sunny side up, like Dark Jar Tin Zoo.
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#dark-jar-tin-zoo #eggs #food #funny #humor

It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined. ↗

— Gilbert White

#district #examined #find #full #greatest

Despite all their flaws, zoos wake us up. They invite us to step outside our most basic assumptions. Offered for our contemplation, the animals remind us of nature’s impossibly varied schemes for survival, all the strategies that species rely upon for courtship and mating and protecting the young and establishing dominance and hunting for something to eat and avoiding being eaten. On a good day, zoos shake people into recognizing the manifold possibilities of existence, what it’s like to walk across the Earth, or swim in its oceans of fly above its forests—even though most animals on display will never have the chance to do any of those things again, at least not in the wild. ↗

— Thomas French

#existence #nature #survival #wild #wildness