Randy Malamud

Do Zoos and Aquariums Promote Attitude Change in Visitors? A Critical Evaluation of the American Zoo and Aquarium Study

Modern-day zoos and aquariums market themselves as places of education and conservation. A recent study conducted by the American Zoo and Aquarium Association (AZA) (Falk et al., 2007) is being widely heralded as the first direct evidence that visits to zoos and aquariums produce long-term positive effects on people’s attitudes toward other animals. In this paper, we address whether this conclusion is warranted by analyzing the study’s methodological soundness. We conclude that Falk et al. (2007) contains at least six major threats to methodological validity that undermine the authors’ conclusions. There remains no compelling evidence for the claim that zoos and aquariums promote attitude change, education, or interest in conservation in visitors, although further investigation of this possibility using methodologically sophisticated designs is warranted.

The Photographer and the Zoo: A Memoir of Mediated Encounters

What kinds of encounters are possible in places entirely structured according to anthropocentric norms and with only minimal regard for the interests of other creatures? The zoo, an institution centered on the human gaze and the satisfaction of human consumptive desires, pushes this question to its extreme, given that the nonhuman creatures involved have been actively transported to and imprisoned in this ostensibly ‘animal-centered’ but in fact violently anthropocentric place. Zoo creatures are, first and foremost, living testimony to the power of humans to remove them from their habitats and put them into places where they do not belong and do not want to be. In this personal essay, the author reflects on his long friendship and collaboration with German photographer Britta Jaschinski, whose photography captures captive animals from zoos around the world, conveying a strong sense of the animals’ out-of-place-ness and the limiting artificiality of their surroundings and living conditions. Her photos point to the ways in which the zoo, rather than being a place that uniquely allows for encounters between human and nonhuman creatures, actually serves as a monument to the impossibility of such encounters—it is a strikingly non-reciprocal, and monological place that forcefully reinscribes, and itself performs, the supposed divide that separates humans from other species.

“Creature Comforts”: Crafting a Common Language Across the Species Divide

Nick Park’s claymation film, “Creature Comforts” (1989), is a “mockumentary”-style interview with zoo animals in which the animals discuss how they feel about their captivity. This short film raises important questions about the boundaries between the human and animal worlds and, intriguingly, about the possibility of a common language across morphological, perceptional, experiential, and other species-specific differences. Through an innovative fusion of human and animal perspectives on (and experiences of) freedom and constraint, the film rearticulates existential questions of human being-in-the-world as questions of creaturely life, thus pointing towards a shared horizon of being for all animals beyond human exceptionalism.

Introduction: Framed Animals

Consider animals in our world. Pandas from China are airlifted to zoos in Atlanta and Washington; Chilean sea bass (actually from Antarctica) grace restaurant tables in New York and London. Skins of baby seals, killed in Newfoundland, and newborn karakul lambs from Afghanistan are auctioned in Seattle, Toronto, Helsinki, and St. Petersburg, and the finished products are traded at fur fairs in Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Montreal. South American chinchillas, African civets, and Amazonian parrots command exorbitant prices in the market for exotic pets. An African rhinoceros stars in a commercial for Dodge Durango, and a Bengal tiger in an ad for Dillard’s department store. Amid these and a thousand other postmodern dislocations, the idea of an animal’s habitat is becoming irrelevant, except as a historical curiosity. Instead, today, an animal’s cultural context supplants its natural context. It used to be that a given animal existed in a certain place, its natural habitat, because this place offered attractive conditions for sustenance, comfort, safety, and reproduction. The animal was suited for this place, and we may assume the animal was happy in this place.

Weird Animals (or, Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?)

Americans do weird things with animals. Others do as well, but as in most other mass-market cultural enterprises, Americans lead the way with our commercially powerful resource-intensive anthrozoological perversities. These perversities proliferate amid America’s imperialistic orientation of entitlement toward our ecosystem (“It is all ours, we bought Alaska, so drill away”), an orientation that sanctions animal fetishism, speciesism, and short-sighted greed for material goods and experiential novelty that we reap at the expense of nonhuman animals.

Strong claims, feeble evidence: A rejoinder to falk et al. (2010)

The criticisms of Falk et al. (2010) are addressed, and the question of whether claims made by Falk et al. (2007) are valid is revisited. This rebuttal contends that Falk et al. (2007) misconstrue Popper’s role in philosophy of science and hence do not provide a strong test of their hypothesis. Falk et al. (2010) claim that they never made causal statements about the impact of zoo and aquarium visits in their 2007 study. Yet, this commentary shows that Falk et al. (2007) draw several unsupported, strong causal conclusions. The criticism that primary documents were not used in Marino et al. (2010) is also addressed, as this refutation demonstrates that the analysis was based on all available documents. Finally, this commentary aims, through its criticisms of Falk et al. (2007), to catalyze better-quality research on the effects of zoo and aquarium visits.