The former--Wildlife parks--effectively put people in cages. The animals are still contained but in larger (un catergorized) cages. The interactions between humans and animals remain similar to their zoomed-in version at Zoos. Mainly people point, name and move on, sometimes they linger take photos, trying verbal interactions, commenting on the cuteness of the creature, or asserting that they like the animal or not. Animal sightings in wildlife parks are fleeting, distant, and non cumulative.

In the last 10 years the mounting criticism of ZOOs have been addressed with two distinct strategies. The first is to decorate the cages with fake rocks, real and fake plants, to try to create the images of the environments these animals may have come from. Ironically this interior decoration is address by humans exterior decorators—landscape architects. The second strategy is to introduce animal toys, like plastic containers, and balls for polar bears to play with, or swings and ladders for monkeys. In neither case do they introduce plant or toys that the animal can ‘use’.

They are never given plantings that they can eat, not prey or food that they can catch themselves.
Both of the strategies concede that the organisms are defined by their environment, not by their name, and that viewing the organism outside of the environments for which they are optimized obscures the spectacle of the animals adaptive strategies, i.e. their intelligence. Animals make little sense to people or to themselves in captivity--hence the widespread use of antidepressant for ZOO animals.

 

 

 

 

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