It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s…

This story was told to me by my visiting goddessmother, who overheard the following exchange as she walked through the zoo:

A boy reading a plaque by the primates exclaimed, “Look, Dad, it’s a white-faced gibbon!”

“That’s not a gibb-on,” the father corrected. “It’s a gah-BAHN.”

And thus is another generation warped by misinformation.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Looking Natural

I admit that, although the majority of the photos I post are from the zoo, I like to take pictures that minimize the visibility of the zoo itself, avoiding the curbs and concrete barriers, cages and glass and electric fencing. Part of that is an aesthetic concern (the non-botanical landscaping is not so attractive), part of it is an obsession with subjects (I want to focus completely on the specific animal[s] I’m interested in), and part of it is, of course, the almost subconscious desire to pretend that these animals are in the wild, in their natural environment—that, in fact, my lens has approached them so closely it’s almost as if we’re out there with them.

It’s not likely that I’ll change my style, but every now and then I get a niggling feeling of guilt, a desire to explicitly address the artificially natural habitat in which these creatures live.

I’m not saying they have terrible lives, and I certainly hope they have contented lives—but, regardless, they do have lives whose boundaries and behaviors are prescribed by humans rather more completely than even those of wild animals whose habitat we’re destroying.

I’ll leave it at that.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Trapped!

I was really hoping to take a walk in the zoo this morning, but I woke to a sky that was disorientingly black, as if it were still the middle of the night, and ominous rumbles of thunder that soon gave way to torrential rain. They sky eventually lightened slightly, but the rain hasn’t, so here I am…

Something to mention about gibbons, though, since I just put up a picture of one: I was walking through the zoo a couple of months ago early on one of those days that the zoo closes early so as to prepare for a special (paid-for) event, the kind where you have to put up lots of little tents and attractions and so on. And I heard this weird video-game noise: “BOOooooo-eeeeeeEEEp; BEEEEEEEE-oooooo”—etc. It wasn’t a construction noise, which the zoo’s had plenty of, too, so I assumed that some kind of video game or other machine has been brought in for the event. Until I passed by the gibbons, that is, and realized that this guy here was actually making these completely mechanical noises:


It was pretty amazing. I’ve heard animals make strange noises before, but never ones that seemed so blatantly artificial.


(She was less than excited about it, though):

He's Pregnant

People, as I may have mentioned about forty thousand times, drive me crazy. And not just the people in zoos, of course, but people in general, and the ways in which they unwittingly perpetuate the most infuriating and detrimental stereotypes about everything—class, race, sex, gender, you name it. It’s part of why I can’t watch television unless I skip through the commercials (those grotesque, manipulative upholders of the status quo); no one in an apartment building likes to hear a madwoman shrieking imprecations at every ad that comes on.

One of the many specific things that drives me crazy about people is how they tend to assume that every animal they see is male. This is not only highly unlikely, statistically speaking—it’s also representative of the way that females, of any kind, get left out of discourse, from The Developments of Mankind to the actions of an ant (if it’s doing work, it’s probably female, people). I heard Marlene Zuk, the renowned biologist, discuss just this problem at an Inclusive Science conference a couple of years ago; she also mentioned the dangers that these assumptions pose for those trying to study and understand animal behavior. And other people, far more incisive critics than I, have addressed this, too: Sherry Ortner, Rayna Reiter, and Kate Millet, among others. (No, I’m not that good; I have a mother who knows these things.)

It’s easy to see these androcentric attitudes in action at the zoo, where every animal a child or adult comments on—unless said animal is actively nursing young—is a he. This is true even when very visible placards explain otherwise. For example, does the orangutan you’re looking at have large cheek pads? No? Then call her “she.” Or, is the gibbon in front of you blonde—the color, the placard tells us, of mature females? Then maybe “Bill” is not an appropriate nickname for her, unless you’re interested in gender-queering your zoo experience (and we both know you’re not).

[This orangutan cannot believe you thought she was male]

You could even try referring to 50% of the animals you see as “she,” just to acknowledge statistical likelihoods. Or here’s an even better idea: just call all the animals you see “she”; you’ll only be half-wrong, and at least you’ll be bucking the trend. And, more importantly, trying to see animals as female might make you think of females differently: you might realize that they do more than just sit on nests—that they are jumping, eating, climbing, yowling, imitating you, scratching themselves, rolling in water, chasing one another—that they are active and interesting. And, most of all, present.

Or you could keep doing what you’re doing and then watch an action movie.

Hell. I think I’ll go reread The Female Man.

["You callin' me 'he'? You callin' me 'he'? Well, I'm the only one here..."]