No one has told you what happens to reindeer after Christmas. You have not had an explanation for what happens to animals’ lifeless bodies. Between fairy tales and real life there is a gap that you can’t seem to bridge. You fill with a mute and invisible rage. You decide that, if your parents continue to hide the truth from you, you will leave with the reindeer straight after Christmas. You will betray them.
II
You don’t like pets, you prefer wild animals. Yet now that you watch so many wildlife programmes, wild animals have become ordinary for you.
I’m a farmer’s son and the eldest of three children, my parents are farm employees, they couldn’t have afforded to pay for all three of their sons to go to university. So as not to disadvantage my younger brothers, I decided to break off my studies, I had an uncle who worked in the zoo and, as luck would have it, I became a handler.
For your desire for a pet – a desire you can never fulfil – you substitute a comprehensive, obsessional and compulsive study of the whole planet’s mammals. The libido sciendi replaces any other libido: the study blankets, the study compensates, the study cares for you, the study consoles, the study delays and deflects the desire for its object such that you take years to understand what exactly that object is and how you might access it. The study is an inexhaustible source of contentment and frustration.
The wildlife park at Vincennes is one of the oldest in Europe. It was built on the site of a temporary zoo created in the Bois de Vincennes for the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, at which you could marvel at native villages and exotic animals. Opened in 1934, the new zoo neglected the native animals to focus on those an urban public would never encounter in its immediate environment. Unlike Paris’s Jardin des Plantes, the zoo’s architects preferred to present its specimens in pits, upon rocky outcrops and on plateaux meant to imitate nature, avoiding bars and fences as much as possible. The building principles and hygiene rules underpinning these constructions demonstrate that those once-modern ideas about nature gradually became old-fashioned.
I am completely anti-zoo but feel I need to remain an insider so I can try to effect gradual, systemic change; to manage my team, define objectives, the most difficult species to deal with is still the handler.
You don’t remember the first time you saw a mammal in the wild. There are so many first times that you’ve forgotten: the first time you saw a tree, the first time you ate a fruit, the first time you touched a human body that wasn’t one of your family. You can’t say when but you can say where: a zoo and, more precisely, the zoo at Vincennes. You can write that sentence in near certainty that you’re not mistaken. The first time you saw a wild animal, it was an animal in captivity.
The mobile or stationary fittings for the units that present living specimens of local and foreign fauna to the public must keep the animals in good living conditions and allow for their oversight while also accommodating the health and safety of visitors and service staff.
The law provides without being unduly moved by irreconcilable demands. For example, reasonable living conditions would generally require that animals remain unobserved.
You hunt through reference books to learn about reindeer ethology, about their way of life and of reproduction, you learn that some are trapped in temperate regions where it snows rarely and only in tiny amounts. In any case, by age twelve, you no longer believe in Father Christmas.
No doorway nor any other access to the enclosure may be located on the public-facing side, and all doors must be equipped with airlock systems. If these doors are solid, they must be furnished with peepholes allowing complete visibility of the enclosure, without blind spots. Accessible to vans and cranes (for deliveries and maintenance), the outdoor areas will aid the animals’ easy circulation. We must work particularly to avoid those bottlenecks likely to cause panic and stampedes and to lead to the fatal crushing of individuals.
You often feel like withdrawing to your bedroom but you don’t dare lock your door for fear that someone in the family, attempting to open it, will realise you wanted to lock yourself in. Why should you want to lock yourself in? What reasons could you have to do so? You mustn’t hide anything from your mother. For fear of having to answer these questions, which you are sure will be asked with a gentleness more hurtful and more insidious even than a telling-off, you never lock yourself in your bedroom. And you do your best to avoid anything that could justify your locking it. You want nothing more than to lock yourself in.
I’ve had only one telling-off worthy of the name, when I dared to go looking for tyres for the gorilla, because he had nothing in his cage, nothing at all. I was summoned by the boss who told me we’re not a circus, the animals are not here for fun and games but to be sat in their cages, they have to be easy to see.
As in prisons, the captive animal must constantly be visible. But unlike prisons, everyone can come and see it, in fact the public is invited in. Showing animals to the public is one of the principal missions of zoos.
Now and then your father comes into your room without warning to do a little tidying. These are the only moments when you lose your cool and your usual equanimity turns to anger. Your father ends up backing out but that won’t stop him from trying again another time. You remain on guard, you prepare to respond. You don’t yet know how but one day you will escape.
Jeremy Bentham is best known for having invented, around the end of the eighteenth century, a prison design known as the panopticon, which allows a person in a central tower to observe all the prisoners in their cells, which are all aligned with the tower – without individual prisoners ever knowing if, at a given moment, they are or are not being observed. This internalisation of surveillance, or invisible surveillance, is at the heart of Bentham’s plan. It was the same Bentham who, in the name of utilitarianism – a term he coined in 1781 to describe a moral and political doctrine according to which an action’s worthiness is measured by the quantity of happiness it generates in the greatest number of people – the same Bentham, then, who, in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), examined the place of animals in the classification of living creatures. If the respect we accord to living creatures is no longer a function of their reasoning but of their sensitivity, and by extension of their capacity for suffering – for it is always easier to read pain upon an average face than pleasure – it becomes critical to change our views on animals. The question is not: can animals speak? but: can animals suffer?
You give up on leaving with the reindeer after Christmas. You can’t see how else your escape could happen. In the meantime, you are growing.
We can easily imagine how, given his knowledge and philosophical interests, Bentham would have enjoyed a commission to construct a utilitarian and panoptical wildlife park in his beloved city of London. Unluckily for him, none of his contemporaries thought of it.
You would like nothing more than to please your mother. You would like nothing more than to evade your mother’s gaze. Your own ambivalence stops you from making decisions. You stay silent. You are growing.
The fixtures intended for the animals’ housing must be adapted to the demands of biology, to the abilities and behaviour of each species. For primates (principally the old-world monkeys: the macaques and baboons), the public sides of their cages are lined with transparent outer walls. The completely enclosed but naturally lit viewing areas offer a minimum height of 2.5 m, surface areas of 10 m2 for a pair of animals, with a further 2 m2 for every additional individual. The ground will ideally be packed hard and fittings allowing the animals to climb and swing should be provided for the sake of the animals’ well-being.
You have an inkling that for as long as you cannot lock yourself away, you will belong to your mother.
During humanity’s eventful history, we may occasionally have shown our audiences not animals themselves but the ways some animals used to go about devouring humans. This would generally take place in jam-packed aren
as and the audiences would consist of whole families there to see some Christian heads broken and to let their hair down.
You instate a strategic disorder in your bedroom. It’s your way of resisting your father’s repeated incursions. You are getting organised.
We’ve had two deaths by lions in our menagerie, seven years apart. Both times, it was human error, the handlers got themselves guzzled because they got cocky, they forgot to close a door properly, so when they open the trapdoor to let the lion into the cage the lion sees there’s a bolt undone, pushes the door, finds itself in the passage face-to-face with its handlers and then, for all it’s a captive, properly fed and cared for, it’s still a wild animal.
You have a feeling that belonging to someone else would allow you to escape from your mother.
For a while the facilities were designed to discourage the animals from hiding in dark corners. In fact, there were no dark corners. The big cats’ cages, unadorned cubes of bare concrete, looked out over a great windowed hall, inside which the visitors moved around, going from one window to the next to admire the black panther, the spotted jaguar or the tiger. Entertainment, the need to attract an audience, demanded permanent visibility. The main characters hadn’t even the right to withdraw temporarily, to allow themselves a moment’s intimacy.
You spend whole Saturdays in the zoological gardens, where a few emus, deer and other cervids are on show to an audience primarily attracted by the prospects of eating candyfloss, shooting BB guns and riding on carousels. You do as they do, go round on the merry-go-rounds, shoot BB guns and ride wooden horses, but you spend longer than the others in the hall of mirrors, where your unrecognisable body is reflected and distorted. For once you briefly stop observing your friends the animals. Anyway, you’re disappointed by the reindeer, by the shape of their antlers, by their dull coats. You struggle to see the link between these stupid ruminants and the mounts on which you were intending to flee East, when you used to believe in Father Christmas.
After the two fatal accidents, we devoted a whole year to security, because it’s not enough to say that the handler should have known better, all they had to do was not screw up, it was their fault. Especially as the stats show that a worker who always keeps the same routine has a one-in-a-thousand chance of making a mistake, which makes for a fatal error every three years; the risk of death is real.
There’s no mirror in your bedroom that allows you to see your body’s gradual alteration. To look at yourself, you have to go to the shared bathroom, where your parents might interrupt your observations at any moment. Rather than take this risk, you keep a close watch on your own desires.
We put in the automatic feedback system which made it physically impossible to open a cage and a sliding door at the same time, but this could not prevent every kind of accident. The handler must make the animals move from the internal compartment where they sleep to the outer cage. They clean the cage first and then, when it’s ready, let the animals move into it so they can clean the sleeping compartment. Before going into the sleeping room, it’s clearly written up in the protocol that the kid has to check they’ve all gone through, and only go in there if they’ve counted them all through, but that means they have to check the whole enclosure, so on some days, they set out to do their check, they bump into a mate, start chatting, the football match, did you see that goal, but holy fuck what a performance, well I never, time flies, have to make tracks, the handler goes off straight to the big cat house, sure that they’ve counted all their charges, though in fact that was yesterday, when they open the compartment door, oops, they’re eyeballing a lion.
You use the loo as a refuge. It’s the only place in the apartment where you can lock yourself in without having to explain why. There you observe the parts of you that can be seen without mirrors. As for the rest, you prudently decide to ignore them.
I came up with a system to spare the handlers any more nasty surprises. No one can go inside the big cats’ sleeping compartments without a key, and that key now has to be picked up from a device set up in front of the big cats’ outer cage. This way the handler is forced to recount the animals before going into the sleeping compartment. It’s a system that we’ve been trialling for several months and it’s giving excellent results.
You read animal books throughout your childhood. You’ve spent long periods staring at diagrams in which the predators sit at the top of pyramid constructions, so first of all you liked the strongest, the most powerful predators, the killers. You despised the little ones, those that, at the base of the pyramid, were almost certain to be eaten by all the others. You also consulted tables that compared the big cats’ running times; personally, you rated the leopard for its speed at the point of attack, you were only sorry it couldn’t keep going for longer. Over the years, you tended to admire the fiercest and fastest of the animals, or those judged to be so. Then there was a moment, you couldn’t say exactly when or why, when the comparative interest you felt for predators and their prey was abruptly reversed.
For the lions, pumas and panthers, the observation area must be sufficiently extensive to allow the animal space for relaxation beyond public view. This depth is 7 m for the lion. It can be as little as 6 m for a puma or a panther. Further, the space must be sunlit and offer shelter from bad weather as well as shady areas where the animals can settle for naps, free of their visitors’ gaze. It should be fitted either with basic bars with a maximum gap of 7 cm, or with a 25 x 15 cm solid-linked wire mesh or netting with links of 10 x 10 cm.
You learn that there’s a great variety of social and sexual systems among animals. It isn’t always the male who goes hunting, nor always the female who waits at home for his return, the young aren’t always protected by their mother, the fathers aren’t always indifferent, couples don’t always stay together, the tribe isn’t always a resource and a support, the males don’t necessarily fight to mount the female, the females don’t necessarily fight each other for their choice of male, the males aren’t inevitably dominant, the females not inevitably dominated, danger doesn’t always come from enemies, life isn’t always a gift and you always have to defend yourself.
For the pumas, panthers and lions, the isolation cages, individual internal cages meant for short-term use, must be made so that the animals can stand upright, turn around and lie down inside them. The temperature in these is kept at 10˚C; aeration through a grille and moderate natural light are requirements.
You will learn it, it’s what you’ll learn first of all, you always have to defend yourself. You are defending yourself.
Sexuality – this was one discovery you made not in person but through a film about life in the wild by Frédéric Rossif. Knowing how much you loved animals but having refused you the pet you begged for, your mother tried to make up for her refusal by taking you to the circus. You pretended that such efforts meant nothing to you – in fact, you used to hate all the drum-rolling, the suspense, the expectation you confusedly thought of as morbid: would the trapeze artist miss the bar and crash to the ground? Would the trainer be gobbled by his animals, or the bareback rider trampled by her galloping horse? All of this made you anxious and sad. To make a change from the mood of these outings, during which you sobbed almost non-stop, your mother opted for the art of cinema. She would take you to see great films adapted from Jules Verne in which half-mad scientists crossed vast deserts and defied nature by inventing improbable and highly spectacular machines. It was on one of these outings that you saw the Frédéric Rossif film, in which big mammals are caught on camera either out hunting, or while in rut. You learnt all at once that we both kill and copulate, and saw, for the first time, the gestures, the movements, the calls and the rhythms. Desire and death unfolded in Technicolor before you had a chance to analyse and decipher the dizzying and enduring effects of these images on your unconscious mind. Your mother was truly sorry. Next time you went to the circus.
Instead of the painted backdrops
which, just a few years ago, had stood in for the residents’ greenery and pandered mainly to their visitors’ imaginations, animal well-being programmes introduced new vegetation somewhat closer to that of some of the animals’ birthplaces, or to that of their parents’, grandparents’, great-grandparents’ and great-great-grandparents’ birthplaces. The animals’ environment looks marginally more like that of their ancestors, or like the places where they would have lived had everything stayed the same. But everything did not stay the same. Some regret it, others celebrate. Instead of the sad concrete slabs on which the felines used to break their claws trying to bury their faeces, eco-earth, made mainly of pine bark and disinfectant micro-organisms, has been invented, a flooring that no longer contradicts the felines’ instincts – felines have been digging to bury their droppings for generations – and spares the handler their daily recourse to bleach for hygiene.
Applied to animals, a step backwards, reconstruction, restitution, in short, the state of nature, marks progress. The captives’ well-being demands that we do not forget their past.
In the wild, animals don’t have time for boredom. Survival, self-defence, hiding, finding shelter and food, all demand great watchfulness, rapid reactions, cunning, forward thinking, qualities that animals must deploy at an early age and which fill their days completely. In captivity, however, the range of available activities is drastically reduced. A bear that would usually spend eight hours a day looking for food will take ten minutes to polish off its bowlful. The rest of the time it has nothing to do, its cage is round so it goes round and round, it picks up the standard tics, it grows bored; if it is not to go into decline, we must find something for it to do.
To Leave with the Reindeer Page 4
