Report or activist project
The Zoo: A Lovely Day Out for All
Video: animal and human interaction at the zoo
Definition of the Zoo
Zoo, also called zoological garden or zoological park, place where wild animals and, in some instances, domesticated animals are exhibited in captivity. In such an establishment, animals can generally be given more intensive care than is possible in nature reserves or sanctuaries. Most long-established zoos exhibit general collections of animals, but some formed more recently specialize in particular groups—e.g., primates, big cats, tropical birds, or waterfowl. Marine invertebrates, fishes, and marine mammals are often kept in separate establishments known as aquariums. The word zoo was first used in the late 19th century as a popular abbreviation for the zoological gardens in London. Source is lost.
The Purpose of the ZOO
Three versions
Why zoos exist? What is the purpose of ZOOs?
‘Of course, the obvious purpose of every zoological park is to serve the general public as an entertainment source and facility through which people can escape reality for e brief moment, and get educated during the stay. The educational part is especially important for children and this way they can learn more about different animals, even plants and develop respect and love for them’.
The more complex part regarding the purpose of zoos consists of the activities for biodiversity conservation. These activities are maintained based on two postulates: quantitative and qualitative conservation of species and public education about the consequences of mother earth’s depletion.
https://iloveveterinary.com/blog/what-is-the-purpose-of-zoos/
Function and purpose
The primary object of zoos that are in the charge of scientific societies is the study of animals. Thus, the purpose of the Zoological Society of London, as stated in its Royal Charter, is “the advancement of Zoology and Animal Physiology and the introduction of new and curious subjects of the Animal Kingdom.” This society has been the model for many other zoological societies throughout the world. In the 19th century the emphasis of the investigations carried out in scientific zoos was mainly on taxonomy, comparative anatomy, and pathology. Today the opportunities for scientific inquiry are much wider, and a few societies have established special research institutions. In the United States the Penrose Research Laboratory, of the Philadelphia Zoo, is particularly concerned with comparative pathology. The New York Zoological Society maintains an Institute for Research in Animal Behavior and, in Trinidad, the William Beebe Tropical Research Station.
In recent years a few zoos have intensified their efforts, frequently in cooperation with educational authorities, to provide an educational program for school children and students. Some zoos have full-time or voluntary guides on their staff, whose job it is to provide more information for visitors than can be given on labels attached to cages. Others meet this need by providing “talking labels,” prerecorded tapes operated by the visitors themselves.
https://www.britannica.com/science/zoo
What Zoos are Meant to do
Today, zoos are meant to entertain and educate the public but have a strong emphasis on scientific research and species conservation. There is a trend toward giving animals more space and recreating natural habitats. Zoos are usually regulated and inspected by the government. https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/zoo/
Three Cons of the Zoo
Con 1
Zoos don't educate the public enough to justify keeping animals captive.
Con 2
Zoos are detrimental to animals' physical health.
Con 3
Zoo confinement is psychologically damaging to animals.
education
The study considered learning outcomes for pupils who were part of either visits guided by a member of educational staff from the zoo or unguided visits. Only 38% of children were able to demonstrate positive learning outcomes, said the paper’s author. In comparison, the majority of children (62%) were deemed to show no change in learning or, worse, experienced negative learning during their trip to the zoo.
https://www.freedomforanimals.org.uk/news/zoos-neither-educate-nor-empower-children
Three Pros of the Zoo
Pro 1
Zoos educate the public about animals and conservation efforts
Pro 2
Zoos produce helpful scientific research.
Pro 3
Zoos save species from extinction and other dangers.
Hitting the wall: my beautiful manatees
Marius
‘Love in the time of extinction’
Marius
Marius: young giraffe as waste product or necessary death?
When a storm of protest broke over the news that the giraffe was to be killed – the small gene pool among European zoos meant there was a risk of inbreeding if it was allowed to reproduce – the zoo posted a detailed justification on its website. It explained that as part of an international programme, only unrelated animals were allowed to breed: "When breeding success increases, it is sometimes necessary to euthanise."
The zoo also said that giving Marius contraceptives would have had unwanted side-effects and represented poor animal welfare, and that there was no programme for releasing giraffes into the wild.
The European Association of Zoos and Aquaria, which monitors international standards and of which Copenhagen is a member, said it fully supported the decision of the zoo. It added that zoo animals were very rarely killed for conservation management, but almost always because of ill health.
"https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/09/marius-giraffe-killed-copenhagen-zoo-protests
Marius: young giraffe as waste product or necessary death?
Our aim is to safeguard for future generations a genetically diverse, healthy population of animals against their extinction," it said in a statement. "Copenhagen is highly involved in these programmes and took a transparent decision that the young animal in question could not contribute to the future of its species further, and given the restraints of space and resources to hold an unlimited number of animals within our network and programme, should therefore be humanely euthanised."
However, Stine Jensen, from Denmark's Organisation against the Suffering of Animals, disagreed: "It shows that a zoo is not the ethical institution that it wants to portray itself as being, because here you have a waste product – that being Marius."
Discussion of Foucault’s Ideas on Power
Power as Productive
https://www.ncl.ac.uk/media/wwwnclacuk/geographypoliticsandsociology/files/POL8058%20Taylor.pdf
Foucauldian concepts to understand ‘life and love in the time of extinction’
Disciplinary power
Power/knowledge
Sovereign power
Biopolitics
The exercise of power
‘The exercise of power consists in guiding the possibility of conduct and putting in order the possible outcome. Basically power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other than a question of government. This word must be allowed the very broad meaning’ Foucault
Sovereign Power
‘The sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring. The right which was formulated as the "power of life and death" was in reality the right to take life or let live. Its symbol, after all, was the sword’.
Foucault in https://criticallegalthinking.com/2017/05/10/michel-foucault-biopolitics-biopower/
THE HUMAN SCIENCES and POWER/KNOWLEDGE
Human sciences emerged in the 18th century- sociology, psychology, criminology, pedagogy
They became a new way to make and know human beings- objectification and subjectification
There is a role of mutual reinforcing between the human sciences and the technologies of power that work together in normalising the individual and populations
Power creating the individual
POWER/KNOWLEDGE
Power: is a strategy, a series of relations. The effects of power arise through its manoeuvres, tactics, techniques and functionings. Power is a complex strategical situation, a multiplicity of force relations.
Power relations also need points of resistance to circulate throughout the social body.
Mechanisms of power have been accompanied by ‘the production of effective instruments for the formation and accumulation of knowledge ie-methods of observation, techniques of registration, procedures for investigation and research, apparatuses of control' (Foucualt, Discipline and Punish).
The exercise of power necessarily puts into circulation apparatus of knowledge, it creates sites where knowledge is formed. Phrased another way, discourse is never neutral or transparent in its effects, it has or is a type of power that is productive.
DISCIPLINARY POWER
a new “micro-physics of power” developed through the eighteenth century, which functioned at the most basic level: that of a human being’s body – its movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity (Foucault Discipline and Punish 1979: 137).
The human body, its elements and behaviour, became subject to a political anatomy of detail, to discipline. Discipline is a technique of power which provides procedures for training or for coercing bodies individual and collective.
DISCIPLINARY POWER
The instruments of disciplinary power are the hierarchical observation, normalising judgement and the examination. He explains:
‘Discipline “makes” individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise’ (1979: 170).
The Emergence of Biopower
Change in the role of the state
Consequences of the Enlightenment
Biopower
Foucault: THIS YEAR I WOULD like to begin studying something that I have called, somewhat vaguely, bio-power. By this I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant, namely, the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the eighteenth century, modern western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species. This is roughly what I have called biopower.
MICHEL FOUCAULT Security, Territory, Population LECTURES AT THE COLLÈGE DE FRANCE,1977-78Edited by Michel Senellart General Editors: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana English Series Editor: Arnold I. Davidson TRANSLATED BY GRAHAM BURCHELL palgrave macmillan
‘Life itself’
Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself: it was the taking charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body. Foucault in https://criticallegalthinking.com/2017/05/10/michel-foucault-biopolitics-biopower/
‘the species body’
Foucault:
The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population. (Italics in original).28
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https://criticallegalthinking.com/2017/05/10/michel-foucault-biopolitics-biopower/