In 2004 I was converted to Feminism after seeing a version of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children in Bilbao. Despite it being in Spanish, all the oppression and stupidity of male dominance was revealed with chilling clarity.
In a similarly damascene fashion, last Friday I was converted to the cause of Animal Rights after visiting Berlin Zoo. It is surely impossible for any semi-sensitive soul not to be scandalised by the desolation in the eyes of the Zoo’s mammals.
My Mother had told me that it was “a bit sad” to see the animals all caged up when I suggested visiting Zoos in the past. She wasn’t wrong, but annoyingly you need to see them for yourself to get the full shock value. Photos and videos don’t capture how unrelentingly bleak their lives are. It is not difficult to find a Gorilla or an Orangutan that will spend hours not moving, staring at the camphone-wielding public with a beseeching sadness.
Even worse than seeing the big cats and intelligent primates curled up in their confinement, was hearing the cretinous whoops and sneers of the humans who had come to gawp. It is a stark reminder of the inherent cruelty of most humans, who are largely content to ignore animal suffering.
It is with a melancholy picture of an Orangutan that I started my new photoblog (which you can currently only get via the feed). It is now three years since I began a photoblog on an old livejournal — taking one photo every day for a year — but the time seemed ripe to start snapping again. Quite where I’ll find the time to take photos is a moot point, but that in itself will encourage me to get out of the house/city on weekends.
Either way — and despite my earlier caveat — I hope these pictures add at least some weight to the case to have Zoos (or at least those with primates, big cats and other large mammals) shut down.
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