MANAGING LOVE AND DEATH AT THE ZOO: THE BIOPOLITICS OF ENDANGERED SPECIES PRESERVATION

The 24 May 1968 issue of Time magazine featured a short article with the title ‘Animal Behavior: Love at the Zoo’. Its topic was the breeding of animals in zoological gardens, but unlike the puff pieces featuring neonate mammals routinely fed to media by zoo publicity departments today, this story sought to highlight the unique dilemmas encountered on the way to such happy successes. It may not have broached the precise mechanics of rhino husbandry or the numbers of elephant miscarriages, but it did recount the frustrations of managing reproduction in these peculiar institutions, from storks, emus and tortoises attempting to mate with their caretakers, to the dangers of provoking a lion’s jealousy. Zoos’ insistence on absolute visibility has often revealed elements of animal sexuality disruptive of their bourgeois tranquillity, but these even more unseemly behind-the-scenes anecdotes, from the ‘embarrassing’ to the ‘pathetic’, expose the extent to which, behind their facade of naturalism, zoological gardens control all aspects of animal life, not only diet and habitat but even the tawdry details of procreation divulged here with such obvious delight.