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?

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