I think about the lion in the Utica Zoo more often than I probably should.
More than a decade ago, I went on a chilly visit to the Utica Zoo and spent a few minutes sadly eying the lone lion there, who was pacing his enclosure, having tread a circular path around the perimeter.
Wary though I am of anthropomorphizing—he seemed depressed.
It was some point after this that I encountered John Berger’s landmark essay about looking at animals, at which point my view on zoos took a more definite shape: I didn’t like them all that much.
But even my stalwart opinion on the depressing nature of zoos isn’t immune to the delight of a toddler seeing a giraffe for the first time.
“It’s BIG,” he whispered. And then yelled something unintelligible, rocking violently back and forth as he held onto the handrail.
This is to say that I had a nice time wandering the Denver Zoo the other night after dark, looking at the holiday lights displays that had painstakingly been put up for the season. In between the oohing and ahing at the spectacle, we also saw some animals.
And—no surprise here—they seemed sort of sad. The rhinoceros half-asleep in its concrete pen; the hippo almost entirely submerged and insensate to the crowd of strollers nearby; the giraffes numbly staring at us inside their triple-height living quarters.
I commented, partly in jest, that the person who came up with the “zoo lights” idea was a genius.
Not so much because decorating a place with holiday lights and then selling tickets for entry is such a novel idea—but because the zoo in the winter is not anyone’s idea of a fun time. Not for the people and not for the animals either. So, for a zoo to draw crowds—thousands of people!—in frigid weather in the darkness is incredible.
Because the truth is that without the holiday spectacle—the lights, the hot chocolate—no one would be visiting the zoo in December. The spectacle is a distraction, ironically, from the place itself: what we are after when we go is the idea of the zoo, not the zoo itself.
Taylor Coe 