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<h1 class="entry-title">Thought to Exist in the Wild</h1>
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<h2 class="title">Awakening from the Nightmare of Zoos</h2>
<span class="author"><span class="by-wrap">by </span> <span
class="by-wrap">Text</span> <span class="by-wrap">by </span>
Derrick Jensen
<span class="by-wrap">Photographs</span> <span
class="by-wrap">by </span> Karen Tweedy-Holmes</span></div>
<span class="by-wrap">Reviewed by</span> Ginger Strand </div>
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<p class="run-in">GRANTED, I have a thing for rhinos. But few
readers could see the sleeping rhinoceros on page thirty-one of <i>Thought
to Exist in the Wild</i> 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 <i>were</i>
at the DMV, expired license speared on his horn.</p>
<p>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.
</p>
<p>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. </p>
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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