The Zoo

Mom and me at the Washington Park Zoo in the early 60s.

I’ve never been much of a fan of zoos. Even when I was a little kid, there was something about seeing those caged animals that didn’t quite sit right with me.

Unusually, there is a zoo only two miles from the home I grew up in. The Washington Park Zoo, in the 60s and 70s, was definitely of the before-animal-rights era. Whether it was as a toddler, or with visiting company, or on a school field trip, or with the Brownies or Girls Scouts, a visit to our zoo always left me feeling sorry for the lions, bears, baboons, and chimpanzees.

The Washington Park Zoo was mostly built during the Roosevelt presidency with funds from the WPA and is widely considered to be a national treasure. In fact, eleven of its buildings are on the National Register of Historic Places. I’ve been to the updated zoo a couple of times in the past several years, and commend the current mission, which according to the website is to house the “Species Survival Plan (SSP) animals, members of designated endangered species groups, and much more who are rescued misplaced exotic pets or non-releasable wildlife due to injuries that they sustained in the wild.” Knowing this helps in making sense of the three bald eagles that sit, albeit majestically, in a small enclosed space on low branches with no ability to fly.

The zoo of my childhood, however, had a much darker aspect to it, and yet, with two pinpoints of light.

The dark side of the era was the horrible conditions in which the animals were housed. Fashioned most probably from concrete, their containers were made to look like caves with both an exterior and interior viewing area. The bears and lions were chained and perhaps sedated as my memory is that they were all mostly sleeping. To me, they looked completely miserable. And dirty. Monkey Island was moated and completely caged in. There was a certain entertainment to watching the monkeys swing on the ropes and scurry about, but to imagine oneself for just one moment in reverse positions was to visibly shiver in horror. The baboons, with their red bottoms facing visitors, communicated their total disdain for exhibition. If they’d been able to give us the finger, they would have. And there were flies, hordes and hordes of flies.

When a baby elephant was purchased, a contest was held to name it. The only thing I could think about when I saw it was the Disney cartoon Dumbo. That story is not a particularly happy one, and though I was delighted to see this little Dumbo in person, I worried about its fate. In 1990 the zoo made the decision to no longer display elephants. The three they had at that point were relocated to a North Carolina zoo.

The pinpoints of light are illustrated by two stories.

Story One: I was a passenger in my best friend’s car when her mom suddenly pulled over to the side of the road, just past the eastern boundary of the zoo’s property. She put her hazard lights on and then hustled us four children out of the car. We were instructed to quickly climb the slight incline along the border fence. Just 30 feet from the car she stopped us and said, “Look!” I have no idea how she could have known what was happening, but we stood there and watched as a ewe gave birth to twin lambs. It was a mesmerizing sight as the lambs emerged from their mother’s womb, burst through the membranes that held them, and heaved in their first breaths of air. Within just a few minutes, they were on wobbly legs eagerly searching for nourishment. Such an astonishing thing to see with one’s own eyes—a sight that I would never have witnessed had it not been for the zoo.



Story Two: The father of a girl I went to school with must have been some sort of manager or overseer of the zoo. This girl called me up one day and excitedly invited me over to play with the baby lions her dad had brought home for them to take care of for a few weeks. The baby lions were each the size of a newborn human and behaved just like kittens. They rolled over on their backs and batted at little toys we dangled in front of them. They jumped at the toys we teased them with and looked at us with curious and questioning eyes. They were cuddly little darlings that had no notion of their fate. One nuzzled into my shoulder and licked my cheek. If not for the zoo, I would never have felt the breath of that little cub in my ear.

Walking through the zoo evokes images of both the horribleness and the wonder of seeing wildlife up close and personal. I think that a zoo, as a refuge for wildlife no longer capable of caring for themselves in the wild, is a worthy cause. But, for the mere satisfaction of human curiosity, I was, and am, definitively opposed.

Copyright DJ Anderson, 2019

Learn about today’s Washington Park Zoo: https://www.washingtonparkzoo.com/