Children love to see animals

38.

What message is given to school students taken to zoos, by their school teachers or parents? If I pity the animals, I also pity the kids for being dragged along to these places on the pretext of educating them about wildlife. They get to see a lot of bored, caged animals, and that’s all. I suppose it helps to desensitise them to the idea that animal factories are okay places too; our society certainly doesn’t want children to be too sensitive towards animals in case they stop eating them. By the time they grow up into adults the process has been more or less completed. By now the adult is too obstinate to see what their own eyes are telling them. We learn to believe that zoos are what they say they are, and that they “save animals”.

So just what do we get when we pay to get into zoos to see a lot of imprisoned exotic creatures? We get what we see, namely a show of the worst sort of horror, the reduction of wild beauty to captive ugliness, by way of incarceration. Mind you, if you like horror, the zoo is just the ticket.