Raven circles. The day we visited the zoo the weather was freezing. It’s only with a touch of melodrama that I say it was the coldest I’d ever been. Even bodily movement—our walking of the zoo loop—wasn’t sufficient to counter the chill. Stopping at an enclosure which held two ravens and two eagles, we discovered that we weren’t alone in our “looping.” Three of the birds were still. Their stoic postures sharply contrasted with the continuous and repetitive movement of one of the resident ravens. She flew in circles, one after another, at once dizzying and disturbing. The sign placed in front of the enclosure explained the migratory routes and distances of the Steller’s sea eagles as well as facts about the Common Raven. The netting sectioned out a piece of sky. Small birds flitted in and out of the wiry rope while the raven circled. Answers to questions like “how did these animals come into captivity?” and, “can they be released?” were as available to us as an answer to Carroll’s “why is a raven like a writing desk?” While the raven’s circling may have been a natural behavior or form of “play,” watching it made me think about “zoochosis.” This term, coined by Bill Travers (1992), is used to describe the expression of repetitive, or stereotypical, behaviors in captive animals. As Geoff Hosey states in the short documentary Zoochosis, ethology still has much to learn about the causal relationship between boredom, frustration and stress and repetitive actions. However, work by Georgia Mason and Ros Clubb offers a starting point. Based on extensive data analysis, they argue that the greater the home range of an animal and the daily distances they move in the wild, the greater likelihood there is that they will present stereotypies in captivity (Report 2002). Animals with large home ranges include: polar bears, elephants, large cats, birds, whales.

For both humans and for animals, “movement is a way of orienting the world and thus particular movements (or lack thereof) have different significance and impact” (Bull 25). As Maxine Sheets-Johnstone states, “aliveness is…a concept grounded in movement” (1999; 135, emphasis in original). Movement, according to Sheets-Johnstone, shapes a self’s subjectivity as well as playing a role in “comprehending the subjectivity of the other”: “it is through movement that we (humans and animals) understand the world” (Bull 32).

I now want to move from the circling raven to my second marked memory: a representation of animal movement—paw swipes. As Jacob Bull writes in the introduction to Moving Animals – Animal Movements (2011),

…to engage with the representations of movement and the methods by which to capture such performances is to engage with the cuts, splices, splashes and lines which scrape, overlay or project animals and their movements onto and into the pages of our more-than-human social world. Such markings are in themselves movements and are fundamental to our understandings of humanimal encounters.

(Bull 32)

From the raven/eagle enclosure we continued walking and found ourselves amongst the cats. For the large percentage of the population proudly self-styled as “cat people,” a description of this collective’s agile, light and almost spectral beauty is unnecessary—it comes with the territory. However, my intention is not to offer a glowing adulation of cats; instead, I am more interested in a moment of “non-seeing.”

Each of the enclosures in this area consisted of wire fences and glass doors towards the (viewer’s) front. It wasn’t always easy to see through the glass, but in one enclosure in particular—that of a single large tiger—the view had been almost completely obscured by muddy paw markings.

While, admittedly, a very specific association, the markings made me think of Anat Pick’s work on animal privacy. In a revisionist reading of John Berger’s famous essay “Why Look at Animals?” (1980), Pick questions the “desire to look” (116). In a world where “technological proxies” give us almost “unlimited access” to the lives of animals (for example, through GPS and radio tracking), Pick (via Lori Gruen) considers the notion of “dignity”:

Nonhuman dignity may only come into question when animals are part of a human social world in which questions of dignity arise. Whether or not an animal herself cares about dignity is not the point.

(Pick 2014, 234)

In what may be a largely anthropomorphic association, in my mind, the paw marks and privacy became incontrovertibly entangled. Like the closing of curtains in houses and theatres, the tiger’s paw markings obscure our vision, evoking the sense that the “performance” is over. Following Pick, I wonder whether “it may be time to debate not only animal agency but the ‘balance between security and freedom’ (deemed appropriate for humans) for the animals we watch at will” (122). “Looking” is bound up with power relations (see Laura Mulvey, 1995) and, in the context of the zoo, an Enlightenment ideal which presupposes that “to see” is “to know.” I wonder, what role does seeing an animal “in-the-flesh” play in motivating conservational activity? And, how effective is this see-know link in the rather decontextualized setting of the zoo?

The mesh is mobile (Morton 30)—a reality which seems at odds with the stasis of zoos. The historical legacy of zoos as colonial displays of human “control” and “exhibition” of nature haunts today’s institutions. Revisions to zoo practices in which, for example, breeding ceases and commodified spaces of captivity become refuges for rescued animals might help with colonial ghostbusting efforts. In other words, a favoring of mobility over money and space over sightings. Open range zoos, like Monarto Zoo in South Australia, which would “fit every major zoo in Australia and still have space left over” seem to me to begin to shake this legacy. I am more inspired, however, by 1/ projects which take advantage of our increasing technological proficiency such as “virtual zoos” and documentaries (cue Blue Planet binge-watching session) and, 2/ projects which look beyond our tendency to “enclose” in both a philosophical and physical sense, to instead engage with and even celebrate the unruliness and unpredictability of animal dynamism. As Gry has said, animals in zoos offer a “confined, finite performance of ecology” which can never capture the reality of their otherwise “unrestrained, intimate enmeshment as ecological beings.” Chisa Hidaka and Benjamin Harley’s Dolphin Dance Project offers an example of a more “enmeshed” humanimal encounter. Their project aims to create immersive films which “bring you eye to eye with wild and free dolphins as they collaborate with trained humans to create underwater dances in the open ocean.” In the creators’ words, in “engaging with another species as our creative equal, we make work that challenges the assumption that we are superior or separate from the rest of nature.”

When we look through the bars, the fences, or the glass of an enclosure, it is often not the animal as animal that we see. Instead, the animal is a souvenir or trophy of a “wilderness” or “natural world” that no longer exists, or that is—at the very least—rapidly diminishing. In Berger’s succinct phrasing, zoo animals are “living monument[s] to their own disappearance” (24). We might go to zoos to temporarily avert our gaze from ourselves and our lives, but in the glassy reflection of the animal’s gaze, my colleagues and I were reminded of anthropocentrism, human destructiveness, and colonial and imperial drives to conquer and control. The mesh-like barriers of zoo enclosures invite us to consider networks of causation. For example, critically endangered orangutans sit in zoos around the world. The arboreal homes of orangutans, and other forest-dwelling animals, are being rapidly cleared away for palm oil and animal agriculture (a cumulative total of 162 million acres of rainforest cleared—with high percentages in Indonesia for palm oil production)1. Rather than dividing, the zoo fence encourages us to “look through” illusions of separateness and into the reality of “the mesh”—our unavoidable interconnectedness with the world and its creaturely inhabitants. As Morton says, “all life forms are the mesh, and so are all the dead ones, as are their habitats which are also made up of living and nonliving beings…and each being in the mesh interacts with others” (29-30). The question “what do animals do for us?” (zoo context: do they educate us, do they entertain us?) might be replaced with the more “meshy,” “what do animals ask of us?” The latter may very well be a beast that escapes (and helps us escape)—bear with me here—anthropocentric enclosures.

Works cited

• Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals?” About Looking. London: Writers and Readers, 1980. 1-26.

• Bull, Jacob. “Introducing movement and animals.” Animal Movements – Moving Animals: Essays on Direction, Velocity and Agency in Humanimal Encounters. Ed. Jacob Bull. Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2011: 23-38.

• Gruen, Lori. “Dignity, Captivity, and an Ethics of Sight.” The Ethics of Captivity. Ed. Lori Gruen. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014: 231-248.

• Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press, 2012.

• Morton, Timothy. “I Believe in Coral,” Zooetics # 3. Kaunas, Lithuania, 19 December 2014, recorded lecture, https://vimeo.com/143234517.

• Pick, Anat. “Why not look at animals.” NECSUS 4.1 (2015): 107-125. https://necsus-ejms.org/why-not-look-at-animals/

• Zoochosis: A Short Documentary. Nanna Paskesen, PeskyPaskesen Productions, 2014 http://www.nannapaskesen.com/zoochosis/