There has been almost as much nonsense said about zoos as religion and same-sex marriage. Well-meaning but misinformed people think that animals in the wild are "happy" simply because they are "free". Such persons envision a large predator -a lion or tiger, usually - roaming about the Gobi Desert on digestive walks, having eaten a prey which graciously accepted its fate, or embarking on calisthenic runs to stay slim after overindulging.
They picture this handsome predator (the life of a meerkat is rarely considered) proudly overseeing its offspring; the whole family watching the sunset from the limbs of trees with collective sighs of pleasures. Then it is captured by barbaric men and mercilessly thrown into tiny jails. Its "happiness" gone, it yearns strongly for "freedom" and does all within its power to escape. Or so some people erroneously imagine.
Undomesticated animals lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy where the supply of food is low, where territory must be continuously defended and parasites forever endured. Fear is the only constant. Where is the "freedom"? Animals in the wild are neither free in space, time nor personal relations.
Theoretically, an animal could abandon its territory and go, breaking all social conventions and boundaries proper to its species, but this is most improbable. Animals are conservative by temperament, arguably reactionary creatures.
The minutest change causes distress. They want life to be just so, hour after hour, day by day. Surprises are never well-received, we witness this in their spacial relations. Whether in a zoo or the wild, an animal inhabits its space in a similar manner to how chess pieces move about a chessboard.
There is no more "freedom" involved in the whereabouts of an ostrich, koala or cheetah than in the location of a knight on a chessboard. Both equate to pattern and purpose. In the wild, animals maintain a routine and repetitive life. In a zoo, if an animal is not in its regular posture at a given time, something has transpired. It may be a little more than a minor change in the environment - a coiled hose inadvertently left out by a keeper has made an uncomfortable impression, a ladder is casting a shadow, the rain has formed a puddle. But to the animal, it is a herald of trouble to come.
Do we not say, "There's no place like home"? That is certainly the case for animals. Animals are territorial - that is the key to their minds. They have but two needs: the consumption of food and water, and the avoidance of enemies. Only a familiar territory fulfills these basic imperatives.
Thus a biologically sound zoo enclosure - be it a cage, pit, aquarium, moated island or avery - is simply another territory, albeit peculiar in its size and proximity to humankind. That it may be smaller than mother nature's counterpart is irrelevant. Territories in the wild are large out of necessity, not out of taste. In a zoo, we do for animals what we have done for ourselves with houses: we amalgamate into a confined space what is traditionally spread out.
Before our contemporary houses and apartment compounds, the cave was here, the river there, the hunting ground a good kilometer away, the lookout another three hundred meters north, the vegetable patch somewhere else. Now, the river flows through taps on demand, we can wash next to where we sleep, we can eat near where we cook, we can have a protective wall to shield us from menacing leeches, snakes and poison ivy, all the while keeping warm and clean. A house is nothing more than an environment that fulfills our basic needs in a compressed manner. A sound zoo enclosure is the equivalent for animals.
Finding within a zoo enclosure all that it requires - a place for resting, eating and drinking, bathing, grooming and an adequate lookout - and discovering it need not go hunting for food is catered daily, an animal will take possession of the habitat in the same manner as it would any wild habitat, the creature marks its territory with splashes of urine so to feel like a landowner - not a prisoner.
It will behave the same in its enclosure as it would in the wild; for as long as a territory - natural or constructed - fulfills the animal's needs, it simply is, without judgment, a given, like the spots on a leopard. If animals were capable of making rational decisions - that is, if they had human levels of intelligence - they would almost certainly opt to reside in a zoo. The defining difference between a zoo and the wild is the notable omission of parasites and predators, replaced instead with an abundance of food in the latter. In simple terms: would you rather live in a penthouse at the Shangri-La with butler service, unlimited access to healthcare professionals and membership at exclusive gyms and swimming pools, or be homeless without anyone to show affection to you?
History provides us with legions of animals that could have escaped but did not, or did and returned. There was an incident in Berlin only last August of the chimpanzee whose cage was inadvertently left unlocked and had disarmed. Becoming increasingly anxious, the chimp began to shriek and slam the door shut repeatedly, until the keeper rushed over to remedy the situation. A heard of roe-deer in Copenhagen stepped out of their corral when the gate was left open. Petrified by the presence of humans, the deer fled for a nearby forest (with a sizable fleet of wild roe-deer).
By nightfall, however, the zoo deer returned to their enclosure where they consumed more food than usual. In Beijing, a zoo contractor was navigating the park early one morning, when, to his shock, a bear emerged from the morning mist and was heading straight for him. In a frantic hurry to escape, the man dropped the planks of wood he was carrying and ran to alert the zoo director. Searching for the escaped bear, they discovered the creature back in its pit, having returned supposedly terrified by the noise the planks of wood made.
If a human, boldest and most intelligent of creatures, will not wander from place to place with only the change in his or her pockets and the clothes on his or her frame, why would an animal, which is by temperament exponentially more conservative?
Certain illusions continue to plague zoos. Close them all down if you insist, but let us all hope that what wildlife remains can survive in what little is left of the natural world.
The writer is an Australian journalist based in Jakarta.
