Staged
On first glance you see beautiful landscapes but they are all artificial miniature landscapes behind a glass wall and when you look closer, in most of them you see a door, painted in the same style as the rest of the little landscape. Everything in these little cells is staged for an audience to look at it. The attraction to look at is animals in a zoo and the artificial environments are where this animals live and are presented to the public. Throughout the whole day people are standing in front of them, some even knocking on the glass walls, cameras and flashes go off constantly. These animals are like actors on a stage in a approximated environment, obliged to entertain the audience.
When I see the little creatures prowling or inert in their cells, it saddens me and I feel so sorry for our animal friends within their painted prisons. Of course some zoos do their best to give the animals a representation of a species-appropriate environment and try to protect endangered species, but for me, in general, zoos are sad places. Outside the cages, the cells and the outdoor zones you see families with children, school classes and all sort of older and younger people, having drinks and snacks, laughing and running around and walking from one animal to the next only to stare at them, rarely to consider them or to develop any thoughts at all.
On first glance you see beautiful landscapes but they are all artificial miniature landscapes behind a glass wall and when you look closer, in most of them you see a door, painted in the same style as the rest of the little landscape. Everything in these little cells is staged for an audience to look at it. The attraction to look at is animals in a zoo and the artificial environments are where this animals live and are presented to the public. Throughout the whole day people are standing in front of them, some even knocking on the glass walls, cameras and flashes go off constantly. These animals are like actors on a stage in a approximated environment, obliged to entertain the audience.
When I see the little creatures prowling or inert in their cells, it saddens me and I feel so sorry for our animal friends within their painted prisons. Of course some zoos do their best to give the animals a representation of a species-appropriate environment and try to protect endangered species, but for me, in general, zoos are sad places. Outside the cages, the cells and the outdoor zones you see families with children, school classes and all sort of older and younger people, having drinks and snacks, laughing and running around and walking from one animal to the next only to stare at them, rarely to consider them or to develop any thoughts at all.
