Raising Good Environmentalists: Do You Zoo?
We zoo. We’re lucky enough to live an hour from the Indianapolis Zoo, and it’s the regular destination for a day trip when preschool is canceled, or dad’s got a day off of work, or a co-parent just absolutely has to have the house to themselves for at least eight hours or someone will have to shell out for marriage counseling.
We zoo, and so real-live lemurs and ostriches and boa constrictors are a familiar sight to my little Midwestern girls. They know about different environments, because the tigers live near the cafe over in the jungle habitat and the giraffes live way past the playground over in the plains. They know that different animals live together differently, because they saw the meerkats in the desert habitat all playing and fighting and humping each other, while the sharks in the oceans exhibit basically just ignore each other while swimming around looking predatory. They can tell which elephants are which in the elephant habitat, and which dolphins are which in the dolphin dome.
But at what price does this manufactured intimacy come?
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Some eco-savvy books, such as You Can Save the Planet, encourage families to visit zoos, but others point to real and immediate issues in animal welfare in zoos. How to get around, for instance, the sight of the polar bear in the mid-July Indiana heat, swimming back-and-forth, back-and-forth? The tiger pacing the perimeter of his enclosure? The koala munching on bunches of eucalyptus just tied to its oak tree? In other words, how to zoo while being saddened by the concept of zoo?
And yet we do zoo. With our planet’s habitats so endangered, I feel it’s necessary to support the preservation aims of a good zoo, even though it is sad. We only visit zoos with a lauded animal care reputation and a principled environmental conservation program. We encourage our girls to view the animals in the zoo with awe and respect and to ask questions of the zoo employees. We tell them where the animals are supposed to live, and then we lie to them. We tell our girls that the animals are only visiting us here for a while so that we can learn about them, and then they’ll go back later to their very own homes and perhaps we can visit them there sometime in the future, if we’re lucky.
Do you zoo?
We love to zoo!
Great points. Conflicting issues. I think we’ll still continue to go to the zoo, like you and your kids. You can’t be the education and exposure to things outside our regular lives.
We just moved near the Toronto Zoo and it is one like you mentioned with a great reputation. We never supported the Vancouver Zoo when we lived in the West for the opposite reason. My daughter is crazy about hippos (she will love the photo above)! I too feel torn about zoos, though. My husband falls in the “zoos are great education” camp. I suppose we have a few years before our kids start asking those difficult questions. I doubt there will be zoos when our kids have kids.
My son isn’t even six months old yet, but I’ve thought about this because of my nieces and nephews. They go to any zoo and every circus. I’m in the no circus camp and will have to carefully research any zoo before visiting. We will zoo, though, and will likely go out of our way to visit the laudable ones.
I don’t remember too many zoo visits when I was a kid, though. The Brooklyn Zoo and some petting zoos, but that’s it. Lots of visits to animal shelters, though.
It’s so good to hear about other good zoos out there. I also think the St. Louis Zoo is really terrific now, especially so because it used to be kind of dicey many, many years ago.
Yeah, and save us from circuses! I’m wary of animals doing tricks and animals performing work for our entertainment–no pony or carriage rides for us, and try explaining that to your four-year-old AND your mother-in-law!
For circuses, I recommend a no-animal group like Cirque du Soleil. Admittedly, they’re a little surreal for my kiddos so far, but I’ve heard lots of kids really like them.