Brian Inch

Zoo Visit

            I went to the Oakland Zoo today. I walked through all of the exhibits, and I observed the displays and people’s reactions to the animals in front of them. The Oakland Zoo is like many other Zoos. With each exhibit they are trying to display to you a different part of the world. I will take you through various exhibits that I saw, and I will try and explain to you the intentions behind each one of their exhibits, and the emotions that they want to evoke.

            Like “Touch the Magic” the Oakland Zoo can “take viewers to spectacularly inaccessible, invisible, or little-known places (Susan G. Davis). For example I was at a display for an animal called a Siamang, which is an ape. This example is a perfect example for this quote in the fact that it is really trying to make the viewer feel like they are in this animal’s habitat. The Siamang exhibit had little concealment, except for a mote, and a 3-foot high fence with bushes on the exhibit side. This little fence was just high enough for small children to peer over, with their perspective of the exhibit it seemed like they were actually in the jungle. With such a minimal barrier, it makes the viewer really feel like they are on the border of a different reality that this animal belongs to. The zoo wishes to create a world that “humans should wish to approach more closely. The notion of far-away worlds trying to contact us…(Davis). The zoo wants to create welcoming settings, with animals that are peaceful, and friendly looking.  An exhibit that I thought felt rather welcoming was the Camel exhibit. The viewer was level with the Camels, and there was nothing in between the fence and Camel. The Camel had the ability to walk within feet of the viewer. While I was walking up to the display, the camels trotted down, in a manner that appeared to quite playful. The zoo wants to make the viewer feel like the camels want to come and play with viewer. But in actuality they are coming to receive food. It says on the fence “don’t feed the animals”. This sign hinted me that the camels come to the viewer often in search of food. But the display isn’t focusing on that, it is the idea that the viewer is to be welcomed into this new reality by a playful camel.

            Another idea that the Zoo wants the viewer to realize is that the animals appear to share similarities to them. “…it is about relationships, feelings, and families”(Davis). An exhibit that I found it blatant was in this tiny exhibit for these tiny turtles. They were in a small tropic rainforest display, which was like mini paradise.  All the turtles in the display were paired up. They want the viewer to see how things should be, in the sense of having your mate. The turtles are only seen in pairs, and it is basically telling the viewer what is natural, and that relationships are important to these turtles like they are to us. The frogs in the display next to them were in basically the same habitat, paired in couples as well.  To me it was clear about how these exhibits wanted to portray how common relationships are in the animal kingdom in parallel with our own. The actions that these critters do really makes the viewer or viewers connect with these animals, and make them believe they have an understanding of their world.

One of the displays that I found particularly interesting was the monkey display. It was pretty simple; it was a little island in the middle of a small mote. It appears that the viewer is wondering through their habitat.  A monkey was swinging non-stop is the tree that had its branches all shifted in the view of the people. This was well placed so that the monkey could appear to be putting on a show for its viewers. But in actuality the monkey probably has no such intentions, it is just within their nature to swing. But with how the tree is situated it created close and sometimes eye-to-eye contact with this swinging monkey. “…lack of a common language, its silence, guarantees it’s distance, it’s exclusion from and of man”(Berger). We look at these swinging animals and try and interpret that they are trying to play with us, or show off, and act human. But in actuality these animals as Berger says don’t confirm anything with men. So we have no idea the reason of his swinging nature. This barrier of silence leads its actions up for interpretation by the viewer, which turns the monkey’s behavior into a performance, rather than it’s natural behavior.  The last exhibit that I visited that really made me think that the zoo was trying to establish a connection between humans and animals is the petting zoo. “...animals offer man companionship which is different from any offered from human exchange”(Berger). At the petting zoo this exhibit creates a bond between small children and animals. From an early age this exhibit creates companionship, and a different type of love for animals. This is the display that fixes in the viewers disappointment in not getting to fully engage with the rest of the animals. They want to make the animals friends of the viewers. The tigers at their display are all given friendly names like Grace, Molly, Ginger. This creates a further connection with these beasts, and makes them more human because they share names with a percentage of the viewers.

I found my visit to the zoo interesting. Each display had a message or a desired idea that they wanted the animal to display. I never really looked at it this way, but the Zoo now appears to me to be a way for the Oakland Zoo to show people the unseen of their daily lives. Now that nature is so separate from our society it is their responsibility to portray it in whatever way they want.