Like many people I have conflicting feelings about zoos. I adore the animals, but find it disturbing to see them caged. This story is about a visit I made to Thiruvananthapuram Zoo, with my wife Eve, and the unexpected encounters we had with the wildlife that had made the zoo its own.
In the capital of Kerala, encircled by thoroughfares teeming with motorbikes and cars, Thiruvananthapuram zoo bristles with abundant vegetation and mature trees like a peaceful green anomaly. The zoo sprawls carelessly down the side of a steep terraced hill where labyrinthine avenues run between enclosures and connect its different levels. When we visited we didn’t have an itinerary in mind, so we followed a series of helpful signs marked “This way ->” to create a route through the meandering pathways. This took us first to the aviary via the rear of an extensive monkey enclosure which dropped away down the slope beside us. As we passed by we could hear the lively chatter of animals but couldn’t determine the source. Supposing it to be the monkeys we began looking around excited that we might catch a glimpse – but it wasn’t the monkeys. Eve quickly traced the chirpy blethering to scores of wild fruit bats roosting in the trees below. They were not asleep as you might expect in the daytime, but animated and full of verbal energy as if on a fruit bat version of a night out. The irony of wild bats roosting within the perimeter of a zoo made use smile.
Turning our attention back to the aviary I felt again that troubling disquiet at animals captive. Somehow this felt worse for enclosed birds. I admired them, but at the same time felt this to be a guilty pleasure. I started to muse about how the cages arrange the animals for our viewing and how we respond to their different situations. The faint sense of disappointment, of feeling cheated even, when the animal on display can’t be seen. The inconvenience of animals asleep in their unlit dormitories. How the untold story of an empty cage leaves behind notes of worry and sadness, but how even these feelings still mingle with a sense of disturbed entitlement as if missing out on a promised encounter.
As we moved along the enclosures, we noticed a pair of macaws, perched quite still on a high woody ledge, both staring bemusedly at another inhabitant of the cage. A rat was busily digging a tunnel in the sandy earth at the bottom of the enclosure. The rat, exhibiting great energy, would disappear down the hole, dirt would fly out, then it would emerge again to run some ratty errand before returning to its excavations. At one point it had a feather in its mouth and I wasn’t sure if it had unearthed it or picked it up from the cage floor. The feather was discarded and the rat continued on its dizzying missions. I felt confusion at this scene. Was the rat supposed to be in the cage cohabiting with the macaws? I looked for the information board that would explain rattus rattus, habits, geography, behaviours. But no. It seemed the rat had discovered the cage, found it to her liking, and moved in. We watched for a while wondering what the macaws made of their room mate.
Despite being entertained by the rat’s antics, my sense of unease increased and I started to ponder what was happening here. Typically zoo enclosures each have only a single species on display and, of course, this isn’t how it works in the wild – far from it. This abruptly connected to something else I’d been thinking about. I had been increasingly struck by how the word ‘ecology’ fails to do justice to the abundance of interconnections within the natural world. From my schooling, the word ecology conjures for me trophic diagrams, cycles of nature pictured as pyramids and arrows where a small number of organisms and processes are shown in relation to each other. Suddenly I could see that the information boards next to each enclosure in the zoo work in exactly in this limiting way, each giving only a morsel of detail about habitat and geography of each captive as if that’s all there is to say. Alongside the solitary ‘one species per cage’ presentation of animals, the zoo seemed to conspire to impoverish our perception of ecology, hiding its riches away like a guilty secret. My head started to spin as I comprehended a truth – that real ecologies have a vast and unimaginable abundance of relationships and connections: a square of turf is richer in its citizens and relationships than the whole of human society. Ecology is an endless constellation of interconnected microcosms. And that knowing this required a restored and elevated reverence, not just life – but for an infinite myriad co-living of lives. To contemplate ecology requires us to transcend our finite notions of individual and relation. It demands no less of us than a mystical engagement and spiritual journey…
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We moved on, our eyes now open to the shadow zoo existing alongside the mundane zoo. The wild cohabiting with the caged. We saw an iridescent kingfisher in the branches above the lake, where also an eagle circled. We saw an animal resembling a large weasel scurrying along one of the paved avenues before disappearing into a burrow. We saw a crow perched on the back of a hippopotamus. We saw more cohabiting rats. It felt that the zoo itself was superfluous, and instead all that was needed was to provide the opportunity, make an invitation, and the wildlife would flow in of its own volition. In our eyes a subtle contrast arose, it began to seem like the caged animals were more subdued and a little faded compared to their vibrant free-roaming cousins.
Just before we left we witnessed a melancholy scene. As we watched a rat snake glided to the topmost extent of the branch in its enclosure. Then it kept on going, rising improbably into the air, questing the empty head space while the rear part of its body provided an anchor. I guessed that it sought the branches it would expect to find higher up were this a living tree. And it kept on going, rising further into the air, wavering but stable, higher and higher until its head almost reached a grill fixed into the enclosure lid. I was suddenly plagued with the irreversible awareness that the snake knew of his own captivity and was trying to escape. I felt an electric shock at this unexpected emotional connection. An alien reptile no longer but instead a kindred being seeking liberty. Finally, the snake overextended itself and toppled bodily onto the dusty floor, defeated.
(‘Rat snakes’ are non-venemous and are encouraged as they tend to prey on rats, mice etc. For this reason they are also known as ‘the farmer’s friend’. This photo of a Rhesus Macaque was taken by at Thiruvananthapuram zoo by Shishirdasika. It is a wikicommons image available to freely use and share under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.)