[D66] Thought to Exist in the Wild

[R.O.]

https://derrickjensen.org/thought-to-exist-in-the-wild/


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Thought to Exist in the Wild


  Thought to Exist in the Wild


    Awakening from the Nightmare of Zoos

by Text by Derrick Jensen Photographs by Karen Tweedy-Holmes
Reviewed by Ginger Strand

GRANTED, I have a thing for rhinos. But few readers could see the 
sleeping rhinoceros on page thirty-one of /Thought to Exist in the Wild/ 
without pausing to ponder the ethics of zoos. The rhino is not being 
hurt. He’s not visibly suffering. He’s not doing anything, really, 
except what you or I would do if we were waiting interminably in a drab 
room at, say, the Department of Motor Vehicles: napping. But he looks 
drastically out of place. He looks like a rhino would look if he /were/ 
at the DMV, expired license speared on his horn.

The picture encapsulates what’s best about this collaboration between 
photographer Karen Tweedy-Holmes and essayist Derrick Jensen. Zoo 
proponents rarely claim that animals want to be locked up. However, they 
argue, zoos are invaluable to conservation and education, so, for the 
good of all animals, some individuals must endure incarceration. 
Tweedy-Holmes’s photograph puts the lie to this defense. It’s not that 
the rhino looks bored, or lonely, or sad, but rather that we learn so 
little by looking at him. Absent his world, the rhino is no longer a 
rhino. Yet somehow, Tweedy-Holmes lets a glimmer of rhino peek through. 
Her photographs have an ability to present her animal subjects not as 
species exemplars but as individuals, diminished though they are.

Derrick Jensen paints the bigger picture, drawing the connection between 
zoos and “the tradition of domination and control . . . already killing 
the planet.” His riff on the absurdity of likening zoos to arks is 
especially good. “Zoos are about power,” he declares: subtler than Roman 
circuses, today’s wildlife conservation parks are still about human 
mastery.

Jensen declares he sees no way of ending the nightmare of zoos without 
ending the nightmare of civilization. Jensen fans will nod: this 
willingness to take the fight to the top is the author’s hallmark. But 
readers unready to jettison civilization — and what exactly civilization 
means is never completely clear — may feel frustrated. Nevertheless, 
Jensen and Tweedy-Holmes ask a critical question that mainstream culture 
seems largely unwilling even to entertain: “How do zoos teach us to 
perceive nonhuman animals and our relationship to them?
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