Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives
by Thomas French
Hyperion, 304 pp.

very time I go to a zoo as an adult, the same thing happens. I’m enjoying walking around—I’m amused by the otters, amazed by the lions, fascinated by the wolf (it looks so much like a dog!), and a little scared of the polar bear, even though she’s on the other side of a moat. Then I get to the gorillas.

The gorillas, to me,  are different. Something in their eyes, which often seem to be averted, is more substantive than the indifference of the lions. I don’t want to say they look soulful, exactly. But the gorillas give me the distinct impression that they understand what’s going on: they’re living their lives behind reinforced glass, and I’m watching them for kicks. They don’t like it. And because they don’t like it, it seems to me, they don’t belong there.

Now, this is not necessarily to say that because I find deeper meaning in the eyes of a gorilla, no gorilla should be kept in a zoo. After all, some people find meaning in the eyes of a chimp, or an elephant; some sensitive souls find it all the way down the food chain, in the eyes of the mouse in the snake pit. And some don’t find it in animals at all. It’s very subjective. This much is clear, though: for many people, at some level, something about zoos is disquieting.

If you’re like me, you grapple with this discomfort by trying not to think about it, and then forgetting the whole thing until the next time you see a great ape. Thomas French took a different approach: he decided to think about it a lot. French, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for the St. Petersburg Times and journalism professor, started paying close attention to Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo back in 2003, when the zoo made the controversial decision to bring in four previously wild African elephants. Over the next six years he inhabited the place, getting to know keepers and animals alike. The book he’s written, Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives, isn’t an explicit attempt to assess the morality of zoos. Rather, it’s a narrative of life in the zoo for both humans and animals. But at the heart of the story, surfacing again and again for French and the reader alike, is the inevitable question in the air at any zoo: Is this okay?

Before we get further into that, though, I want to make this clear: Zoo Story is a very fun read. French manages many feats of storytelling here, but the greatest is writing a book for adults with compelling animal characters. And I don’t mean that interesting things happen involving animals. These creatures have distinct personalities and biographies. I was completely invested in the story of Herman the chimp, who was born in the wild, then taken into captivity after quite possibly being yanked from the arms of his slaughtered mother. An American man purchased Herman in a market and took him home to raise with his human children—the chimp wore diapers and had his height marked off on the wall. Years later, when he was given to the zoo, he displayed confusion about his species, exhibiting no interest whatsoever in mating with female chimps but propositioning any blond woman he saw, trying to persuade her to bare her shoulders (one female keeper obliges him each morning, explaining that it costs her nothing). If he saw a human male standing beside one of his preferred females, he threw a fit. With his fellow chimps, though, Herman was exceedingly gentle and patient—much like a human raising a baby chimp might be.

Compared to Herman and some of the other animals, the human characters in the book run together a bit. But plenty of interesting things do happen involving humans. The logistical challenges of wild animal captivity turn out, not unexpectedly, to be considerable. Elephants in captivity, for instance, need constant foot care—their toenails and the thick skin of their soles don’t wear away if they don’t walk long distances, and the too-thick skin can crack and develop infections. This means the elephants’ feet need to be trimmed, but elephants have a tendency to stomp things that displease them. And there are two of the biggest challenges faced by zookeepers: preventing escapes, and getting endangered animals to reproduce. I won’t give too much away, but Zoo Story features both a dramatic escape scene and a sex scene more suspenseful than anything a modern-day romantic comedy could muster.

Of course, one possible explanation for the fact that it’s so hard to keep wild animals in zoos is that wild animals aren’t meant to be in zoos. If elephants need such extensive foot care in captivity, maybe that’s a sign that they shouldn’t be there?

French makes the difficult ethical questions about zoos evident from the opening of Zoo Story, a scene from 2003 in which eleven elephants ride an airplane from Africa to the U.S. The reason the elephants are flying is that they’ve run out of space in the game park where they lived. It’s a human conceit that we’re the only species capable of disrupting the “natural” environment; elephants can destroy ecosystems too, eating and trampling forests until they become deserts. Humans have, at points, controlled elephant populations with “culls” (slaughters) that left behind generations of traumatized, rampaging survivors. The administrators of these particular elephants’ park had reluctantly decided to try two zoos instead.

Here’s the case, as relayed to French by keepers and administrators throughout the book: zoos like Lowry Park treat animals well. They build naturalistic habitats for them (even if some of the features, like fake bird droppings, are more for the humans than the animals) and provide advanced veterinary care and appropriate, healthy diets. They also raise money and awareness for conservation efforts (the zoo animals act as ambassadors of a sort, this thinking goes), provide refuge for endangered species, and help breed those species to increase their numbers.

At Lowry Park, French does find evidence for the case that zoos are a net positive for the animal world. There are lots of endangered species in the zoo, and some of them breed. The institution also has a conservation fund and, moreover, exposes millions of visitors to wildlife they would otherwise never encounter, perhaps raising their interest in and commitment to keeping these creatures on the planet. But French finds reason to be skeptical about the zoo’s contributions as well. Yes, it breeds endangered species, but many of the offspring never go back into the wild—is that really “conservation”? And there’s the fact that the zoo’s CEO makes over $200,000 while keepers start at $7.50 an hour, and that employees regularly complain about understaffing. Lowry employs just one veterinarian for 1,800 animals, which makes French wonder whether the zoo is doing as well by the animals as it should. The zoo argues that its attempts to boost revenue fund its conservation efforts; French points out that “the reverse could be argued as well. Critics often said that such conservation efforts were token gestures, designed to legitimize the larger exploitation that zoos perpetrate every day.”

French doesn’t try to resolve the conservation vs. exploitation question so much as to survey the relevant considerations. This is fine, but for readers (like me) who hope to come away from a book like this with something more conclusive, he might have made more of an effort to quantify matters by, say, examining Lowry Park’s—or all zoos’—conservation efforts more closely. Even if he had, however, we’d still have the unanswerable question of what being in a zoo means for the captive animals—the mystery, that is, of the gorilla’s eyes.

French does his best to explore this, by relaying a keeper’s observation that the “notion of freedom is a human invention, and that creatures in the wild are rarely free and are in fact confined by territory, hunger, and the constant threat of predators.” And he repeatedly (and admirably) ignores Wittgenstein’s proscription, “Even if a lion could speak, we could not understand him,” by, for instance, trying to guess what it’s like for Herman when his human father visits him at the zoo.

He doesn’t settle on a definitive answer for this question either. In the end, he just doesn’t know if being in a zoo is fair to the animals. His outlook on the institutions generally ends up at something like ambivalent support, spiked with a romantic fascination.

I have only a couple of quibbles with French’s work. The first is with his treatment of the animal rights organization PETA, which surfaces occasionally to object to the elephant exhibit and which French tends to dismiss condescendingly even while admitting that the activists aren’t necessarily wrong. The condescension isn’t a big problem (and it makes for better writing), but it would have been nice if, somewhere in these 200-plus pages, French had found time to sit down with a member and let him or her talk. If French can humanize a tiger, surely he can humanize PETA.

The second issue is that French might have informed his story with a little more context about the broader relationship between humans and animals. Does it make sense, for instance, to get upset about zoos when we have slaughterhouses? And if keeping a tiger in a zoo is unnatural, what would be a “natural” way for a human to interact with a tiger? To get chased down and killed by one, perhaps? Zoos are interesting precisely because they’re peculiar, and it might help to know a little more about the norm.

As for French’s conclusions, it’s probably my own fault that I found them a bit disappointing. It’s just not realistic to expect a guy to resolve a philosophical conundrum thousands of years in the making by spending six years hanging out at the Tampa zoo. What French offers here is not clarity, but a compelling story to make us more informed in our confusion. I still don’t totally know what to think about zoos, but it’s probably better than trying not to think about them at all.