His gaze against the sweeping of the bars

has grown so weary, it can hold no more.

To him, there seem to be a thousand bars

and back behind those thousand bars no world.*

…..

Human zoos, for almost five centuries, displayed black and indigenous peoples in cages. These large-scale exhibitions of human beings were specific to the colonial powers and remained popular into the 20th century. Western promoters actively recruited troupes, families or performers from all over the world, mostly coercively and rarely by offering contracts. The humans who were kept in these zoos, died unknown and unremembered. Many of them froze to death in the cold, still wearing what was determined their ‘native dress,’ or died from diseases that did not exist in their native countries.

Many people console themselves with the belief that the horrid level of racism and discrimination in human zoos remains safely in the past. But this is far from the case. The discrimination of the past continues to bleed through into the present, albeit in a slightly different form.

Today, there are more than 10,000 zoos estimated worldwide, holding millions of wild animals in captivity. Most capitals and major cities across the world do have zoos, as well as a great many other captive wild animal facilities that have developed over the years. Having emerged in modern societies as an extension of the colonial project of dividing, categorising, and rationalising controlled groups, “zoos” are functional in their ability to maintain social inequality. Although framed as educational family-friendly spaces, zoos entail the non-consensual control of vulnerable beings for the pleasure and convenience of humans, in a mentality like that of the human zoos.

Animals trapped in the confines of even the most modern and conscientious “zoos” cannot -by any reasonable stretch of the imagination- be said to lead natural lives. Their movements are severely confined, their interactions with other animals are restricted, and their eating and sexual behaviours are entirely dependent upon the whims of human authority. Rather than challenging speciesism, “zoos” reinforce it by encouraging visitors to take on the role of privileged observers who may access inmates at their leisure and convenience for the purposes of entertainment. The clear, physical segregation built into zoo displays encourages further discrimination, resembling to that of prisons. It comes as no surprise that many animals at zoos may die prematurely from stress or illness.

Documenting zoos, which reaffirm an assumed hierarchy between species and robbing animals of their most basic rights, has been an engrossing journey for me. Regardless of the conditions of animals, power relations in a zoo provides the same basis of relationship witnessed in human-zoos. I believe however -seemingly- high the standards are, it is an absolutely cruel act to keep these animals under a lifetime captivity stripping them off their power and life force. I believe change is not only possible but also necessary. Hopefully oneday humankind will reevaluate their approach to zoos and be alienated from the idea of being entertained at the cost of the other.

* The Panther, In the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, Rainer Maria Rilke