ABSTRACT
This verse from The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts by Hilaire Belloc is, indirectly, a relevant comment on nature in the city. Driven to extinction in the seventeenth century, the Dodo, together with numerous other extinct, rare or unusual creatures, were mounted and preserved for posterity in city museums. At one time museums and zoos provided people with the only opportunity of seeing animals they had read about in books. They were collectors items, curiosities to be marvelled at for their size, ferocity, brightly coloured posteriors or strange shapes. Today the animals, mouldering and dusty in their glass cages, are depressing reminders of an growing number of species that have vanished from the scene. Zoos have become more sophisticated in the way animals are exhibited, and are more enjoyable as entertainment; and some have breeding programmes that are aimed at preserving endangered species. But they represent a view of nature that is remote; external to human affairs. On this John Livingston comments that
the role of Nature in the necessary subsidization of the human interest comes into sharpest focus in the use of animals for entertainment. Animals of all sorts, both wild and domesticated, are pressed into service for this purpose…. In my view, zoos convey and reinforce not only the ‘us’ and (undifferentiated) ‘them’ bifurcation of the living world, but also contrive to feed and nourish the fundamentalist myth of absolute human power and control.2
