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Animaladies of Captivity
ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS WORK HARD to project images of recreated nature, at once wild and peaceable, but anecdotes from keepers often paint a messier and grittier picture. Take, for instance, these two intriguing first-hand accounts from the Moscow Zoo in the early twentieth century. In Pyotr Manteufel’s Tales of A Naturalist, the scientist relates all manner of bizarre experiments and occurrences: antelopes who would not cross fence lines even after the removal of the physical obstacle; a brown bear scared away from escaping by the use of firecrackers; a male bear’s aggression toward its cubs, ferociously repelled by the mother; animals whose small cages prevent them from exercising and, as a result, die of heart problems the instant they are introduced to wider spaces; a mixed company of wolves, badgers, raccoons, foxes, and a bear living together in peace; polecats and even rats raised by domestic cats; an elephant in transit picking up and throwing a man who pricked her trunk with a pin; a python who ate a crocodile; an escaped goat who terrified customers by smashing a mirror in a barbershop; live fish transported without water; warthog piglets trampled to death by their own mother.1 Former keeper Vera Hegi’s Les Captifs du zoo assembles a comparable album of curious tales: a secretly tame, mercurial tigress; a falcon that dashed itself to death against its bars; a melancholic and capricious tapir; a moose channelling a grudge between keepers; a bear that died of emotion when the group of people it had originally been bought from returned to the zoo; an escaped, photogenic condor; strange, disruptive, and cruel crowds; amputations and autopsies; dangerous and deadly attacks upon visitors and keepers.2 These motley sketches reveal painful fates, unprecedented relationships, cruel experiments, strange transformations. The scientific care of wild animals in zoos, like the relationships of humans and animals more broadly, produces weird curiosities and crippling wounds, intimate attachments and fatal antipathies.
What are we to make of such discomfiting tales? What light might they shed on the vast range of new meetings and misunderstandings between species in the anthropocene? Fiona Probyn-Rapsey has proposed the term animaladies to “gesture at a state of profound dis-ease in the face of destructive human/animal relationships...