Zoos Enrich Our Lives but Cost Animals Their Dignity, Says Bill Nye | Big Think

So recently, a four-year-old kid got into a gorilla enclosure in a zoo, and the zoo officials decided, in the safety of the kid, they had to kill the gorilla. So here was an animal that was in his natural habitat in Africa, doing his gorillatical thing. And he got captured and ended up in a zoo. And then the guy got shot because some kid crawled into his enclosure. It’s just – there’s no good thing about this.

With that said, my life was certainly enriched by going to zoos. I learned that even a giraffe could exist was an amazing thing to me. And the smell of the zoo was, or is, something I’ll never forget. It reminds me of farms; there’s animal excrement that has to be dealt with. And you see how much you have in common with these creatures. Is it ethical? I think we all agree it would be better if we didn’t have zoos. If we had a way to interact with animals without causing them such hardship.

Now, the example from my personal experience, which really affects me and affects my judgment on this, there was a guy named Ivan who was a gorilla brought to the United States in the 1960s. My recollection is 1962. And he lived with a family in Tacoma, Washington. And they hung out. The gorilla was at the dinner table, and they did gorilla-human interaction things, played games, did stuff. But the guy eventually got to be the 400-pound gorilla in the room, and they had to put him in an enclosure in a cage that was concrete.

And you could visit him in the B&I Department Store in Tacoma, Washington. And this is in the Pacific Northwest, and this guy was a character, a feature, a tourist attraction. And I don’t know – I’m not a primate expert, but I looked at Ivan. I looked him in the eye. We had a little meeting behind the glass, and the guy wasn’t angry at me so much as bored. Like, this sucks, you know, I got a rubber swing. Humans are interesting, but it’s really not my deal.

He got transferred to the Atlanta zoo, and I visited him in the Atlanta zoo, and he had it going on, man. He had a big enclosure. He had girl gorillas. And you could just tell by the way he was walking around; this does not suck. This is cool. That was my interpretation of Ivan’s emotions. I may be completely wrong about this, but Ivan grew up with humans. He accepted humans. Humans were as much his pets as he was our pet. And so there was some crossover there that I found really compelling as a human.

Now, there’s another guy who’s in the Seattle zoo, the Woodland Park zoo, and his name is Vip, very important person, Vip. And when you look at Vip, he’s looking at you, okay human, this kind of sucks. You are a skinny nothing, and I could reach in there, and I could strangle you, and I could break you over my knee right now. And you know what else? I’m a vegetarian. Yet I want to mess you up because he can just tell that something went wrong. His people are huge. They’re living in a forest. They had it going on, and now they’re stuck in this glass enclosure.

There’s a lot of room, I guess. There’s a waterfall or whatever, but this is not what I had in mind growing up. So there’s these two gorillas that have had a deep effect on my perception. If we had a way to interact with these creatures without causing them hardship, it would be cool. And I will say, as a kid, my life was enriched by visiting zoos. So people have got to think this through, and I say right now, thinking about it, it seems like humane enclosures where the animals don’t have to face predators, don’t have to have their offspring eaten literally by lions or dogs. That’s not bad.

But causing them hardship and shooting this guy, this is really troubling. Should the parents be sued? My brother, who has raised four children, just rails all the time about parents who are not attentive, parents who leave their kids unattended. So there’s something to that. Should that parent and that child pay the ultimate price for this transgression of the zoo enclosure not being four-year-old proof? Man, there’s not a clear-cut answer. But I hope we all learn from this.

Make the enclosures robust, the enclosures that exist now. Let us all rethink about the ethics of confining these primates that we’re so close to, and let us promote diversity. One of the great things that may come from modern zoos is the ability to reintroduce these animals into the ecosystem.

And another example that’s on my mind for everybody, for you to think about before we move away from this topic. Apparently, using satellite imagery and park rangers’ experience walking around on the ground in Yellowstone, park service rangers and officials noticed that there were very few young trees growing along the banks of streams in Yellowstone. And then wolves were reintroduced from a humane standpoint. Wolves are part of the ecosystem. Why should we always be shooting wolves or catching wolves and killing them and making wolf rugs or whatever we would do?

And when the wolves were reintroduced, young trees appeared again because the wolves were eating the elk that would eat the young shoots of the trees when the trees would grow along the banks of the streams. You would not think the right way – if you want more trees, bring in wolves. But that is apparently what happened. Ecosystems are very complicated.

So the more diversity we can induce or reintroduce into ecosystems, the better. So it is reasonable to me that zoos have a role in reintroducing megafauna, big animals. That’s very reasonable. But the kids getting in the enclosure and shooting the gorilla – that is a lose-lose negotiation. I hope we all feel bad about that.