Zoo Story: Life In The Garden Of Captives, By Thomas French

Zoos undoubtedly have a positive impact on the scientific community because they are the libraries in which we learn animal behavior, instinctual survival, and provide housing for the rescue rehabilitation and release programs. Jeremy Bentham, a 19th century English philosopher, once said this regarding animals, “The question is not, ‘can they reason?’ nor, ‘can they talk?’ but, ‘can they suffer?’”. In this quote, Bentham is addressing the issue of animal cruelty and the misguided ethics behind the barbarity. The answer can be quite complex, considering no one can definitively say what the best interest of the animals are. Thomas French, in his book Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives, explores Bentham’s question during his immersion expedition at the Lowry Park Zoo.
On page 23 of Zoo Story, French speaks of the dark side of zoos, “Lowry Park’s very existence declared [man’s] 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”. What French is trying to explain here is that just because we can trap these animals, does not mean we should. This argument’s weight is carried by the amount of sympathy humans have for animals. The troubling thought that these animals are suffering inside those cages is a response from our moral beliefs. The elephant that is taken from the flat lands of Africa and placed in a half acre enclosure in New York can be thought of as unethical. On the other hand, a lion that is born in captivity and fed twice a day its entire life would not survive if you were to place it into the wild. That also could be considered unethical because humans are the reason it never learned to hunt and would die of starvation. Sadly, the human desire to control everything can cause us to lose track of the ethical meaning behind right and