Zoo researchers have found through eavesdropping studies (in which One recent online survey suggests that more than half of zoo visitors are family groups - but a big proportion, too, are adults with no children. JustĪs dancers have body memory, we have wilderness memory. Smells create a subtle olfactory landscape that stirs us: from the sweet drops that male elephants dribble from glands near their eyes in mating season to the scent signposts of lions, hyenas and other animals. The random gibbering and roaring, cackling and hooting, yowling and grunting strikeĪncient chords in us, a feral harmony that intrigues and lulls. Quiet, parklike setting offers an oasis in the crowded, noisy, stressful, morally ambiguous world where humans tend to congregate. Though not a natural world by any means, more like a collection of living dioramas, a zoo exists in its own time zone, somewhere between the seasonal sense of animals and our madly ticking watch time. I think people are also drawn to a special stripe of innocence they hope to find there. Why do we flock to them? It’s not just a pleasant outing with family or friends, or to introduce children (whose lives are aĬavalcade of animal images) to real animals, though those are still big reasons. More than 150 million people a year visit zoos and aquariums in the United States. The animals are silent victims, supposedly beyond our ideas of good and evil. It’s the ultimate massacre of the innocents. We’re used to the killing of enemies, but we reserve a special circle of hell for people who set fire to zoos. In 2003 after the Baghdad Zoo was bombed. Their refuge became one of the most successful hide-outs of the war.Īfter I wrote about this true story in “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” readers shared their outrage with me about the bombing of a zoo, which they regarded almost as a sacrilege. WHEN the Warsaw Zoo was bombed during World War II, killing most of the animals, the zookeepers devised a dangerous plan: they decided to use the cages and enclosures to hide more than 300 Jews who were fleeing the The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

A history of love by diane ackerman