In the absence of further trips with your mother to discover sex, violence, nature and death via the art of cinema, you watch TV series. You have a feeling that nothing ever happens to you.
For example, to prevent the monkeys eating their meals too quickly, we hide the food inside boxes, in twists of paper, in mazes, so that to reach their bananas and seeds they have to come up with all kinds of strategies, to use a range of tools that we provide for them.
You watch Skippy, Daktari and Flipper. These series show the adventures of wild animals tamed by men and living peacefully alongside them. Poachers and traffickers of arms, fur and wild meat are forever interfering with these paradises, trying to burn down the reserve, to ransack the safari park, to steal and resell the best-trained animals, even to kill the sanctuary guardians. Luckily, a short-sighted lion, a clever chimp, a chatty dolphin and a feisty kangaroo are ready to ensure the renewed delight of those children who, on Thursday afternoons when there’s no school, are allowed exceptionally to turn on the small screen and break up the long march of those empty hours. Were paradise not endangered, you’d not even know how to kill time trying to save it. More than on all the other days, on Thursday afternoons you are bored. Boredom is worse than anything, it’s worse than death.
In the wild, well-being coincides with an ephemeral moment of satisfaction which, if we’re after a human equivalent to describe it, might feel something like the temporary achievement of an objective, that of remaining alive. But in a zoo, there’s a lack of goals. To survive the absurdity of their existence, every captive must invent specific goals and expend all their energy achieving them. From this perspective, it helps if they choose goals that are extremely challenging but not impossible. Maintaining captive creatures in a satisfactory physical and moral state depends on their capacity to focus on the future.
The main character in Wally Gator, one of the cartoons that you watch although you’ve really outgrown them, is forever trying to escape from his zoo. To do this, he walks determinedly on his back feet, exactly as if he were part of the human species, and strides proudly beneath a great banner that marks the establishment’s boundary. From here he goes into hiding until, at the end of every episode, the zoo’s guards recapture him. Your enjoyment is twofold and also somewhat ambivalent. You’re happy about the alligator’s temporary escape from his guardians but you’re relieved, show after show, to see his bids for escape end in failure. Zoo animals must not be allowed to cut and run, nor must their masters’ surveillance be found wanting. Otherwise there’d be no more stories to dream up in your head and you’d have to go into action.
During the dromedaries’ moulting period, we decided to gather the great tufts of hair, and to bring in packs of frozen blood from the abattoirs. We scattered it all in the big cats’ cages. Thanks to these novelties, the cats are doing much better, they’ve got new smells to discover, they’re stimulated, active, they’ve got things to do.
Being well fed and well housed has the effect of numbing our senses.
Transport for the animals should be conceived so as to provide sufficient space for them to stand upright inside, in their natural postures. Containers and equipment must moreover leave enough space above the animals’ heads to maintain a suitable quality of air for the species being transported, especially when inside sealed vessels. Lastly, they must be sufficiently robust to bear the animals’ weight, to prevent them from escaping or falling, to withstand stress arising from the animals’ movements, and to include rigid divisions capable of withstanding any agitation among the animals which, for a range of reasons, from fury to incomprehension, have a tendency to throw themselves violently against their enclosures.
In the bathroom, in your bedroom, everywhere else, your body is changing in your absence. You’ve no means of seeing your evolving height, your features, your shape; your pauses at the mirror are closely monitored. You have a feeling that the space allowed you is shrinking year by year, though it’s only that your limbs are growing.
In 2008, the Vincennes menagerie closed down. Its dilapidated facilities were crying out for renovation. They’d already overhauled the artificial Monkey Rock, a tall and extensive yet completely hollow cement-and-concrete structure which overlooked the whole zoo and was, in a way, the iconic attraction’s signature, but the rest was unreformed. They had to move all the animals out, find them new homes, transport them in specially fitted lorries, ships and aeroplanes. They were sent to Paris-Le Bourget Airport in wooden boxes, destined for Algeria, except the giraffes, which were too complicated to move, and the two hippopotamuses, which refused to leave. Yet we had prepared them for their departure by making them climb into the boxes every day. We wanted to avoid anaesthesia, which carries risks and substantially adds to the animals’ weight. But when D-Day came round, the female hippo panicked and started headbutting the bars. The male copied her and also became agitated. With the repeated blows and the animals’ combined weight, the boxes looked close to breaking, so we had to give up on moving them.
We can imagine the lives those giraffes and hippos lead now, builders’ cranes and rubbish skips their sole remaining company, awaiting as they are the new facilities through which their lives may come a little closer to those they had in the wild – at least for those that can remember it. Most of the animals were actually born in captivity and know nothing of the African savannah.
Your sense of your own body is much vaguer than your sense of some animals’ bodies. Yet your mother has given you a book about the technical aspects of sexual relations, those relations being strictly limited to penetration. You’ve no wish to be penetrated, especially as, at least in this book, no link is made between penetration and pleasure.
Since the state refused to finance the zoo’s renovation, an invitation for tender has been widely disseminated, yet businesses are proving slow to throw their hats in to shoulder the enormous cost of renovating an institution rumoured to be unprofitable even once renovated. The only hope to motivate private investment would be if a president were to take up the cause and, following the example of the primitive arts museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the National Library, decide to lend their name to this building site.
In the films you watch on TV with your parents, when the boys put their bodies on top of the girls, who are as a rule much younger, they almost all put their hand over the girl’s mouth as if to stop her from speaking or shouting. You ask your mother what this gesture means. She explains that the girls are going to lose their virginity. You conclude that losing one’s virginity leads to shouts that boys would rather not hear.
Now, we have no right whatsoever to buy and sell animals, but not so long ago it was easy enough to start a zoo, you went to a vendor who you informed exactly what you were after, and he made sure to provide it. As an anti-trafficking measure, wild animals no longer have value on the open market, yet many specimens still reach us through customs; they’re seized as smuggled goods, the law requires that we receive them as such. When we have 250 snakes and a few crocodiles come through, as happened most recently, considering our space it’s not always easy, and then we’re criticised for the way we present the animals, their lack of accommodation or room to move around, but we’re an official state museum, we’re legally bound to provide this service.
To the advice you’re given, to the requests you receive, to the hopes vested in you and that remain unspoken, you respond as loyally as you can. But your loyalty comes at a cost, so you compensate with mild exasperation, a degree of passivity and a good deal of inertia. Your body goes on changing.
Like at the circus, the zoo’s audience is divided between the fear of seeing and the desire to see a handler be devoured alive by predators. This is why they crowd outside the windows or bars as soon as a human form penetrates the area reserved for the animals, penetration which is strictly regulated and, as of a few years ago, practically off limits both for security reasons and to avoid what is known as
imprinting.
Your mother goes back to the art of cinema. You go with her to see the original version of King Kong.
If we want an orangutan to remain an orangutan we must interfere as little as possible, otherwise we humanise it. Yes, it’s a little frustrating for the handler because they lose all direct contact with the animals, but rules are rules: we don’t go into the cages, we don’t try to tame them, we keep space between us. They must not forget where they’re from and what they are.
If you were a monkey, if you were in captivity, if you knew that you’d never leave again, you might perhaps like us to remind you of your ancestors’ story, but after a while, rather than maintaining a purposeless readiness for rebellion solely meant to reassure humans of their own good intentions, you might prefer to forget a past whose only use now is to gauge what you’ve lost. You’d prefer to be humanised. To be less unhappy, we become our own betrayers.
King Kong portrays our fantasised connection with animals, a tangle of revulsion, desire, fear and fascination all at once. The gorilla is much too big and too strong to live in our world; we must eliminate the gorilla. But by eliminating it, we find we are also eliminating part of our own story, our roots, and we are sad to see that great hairy body crumpled at the foot of the Empire State Building.
One day, a young orangutan came in straight from customs without any female to feed him. Of course at the nursery we loved feeding him and watching him grow, and as the rules weren’t so strict at the time I even thought of taking him home and of my wife and me bringing him up. The hardest part was teaching him to climb trees and swing from them, at first he was always falling, we had no training for this and weren’t always able to catch him when he slipped.
The problem with King Kong is you’re not sure if you’re meant to identify with the blonde girl who is, by the by, in one memorable scene patiently stripped to near-nudity by the creature, or with the young lover who saves her from the gorilla’s vast grip, or with the gorilla himself, transformed as he is into a fairground attraction and bound by great chains to a scaffold taller than him. You don’t dare ask your mother about the function of identification in the art of cinema.
The declared objective of wildlife parks is to preserve species as they are and ultimately to enable their reintroduction into the wild. We must therefore maintain the animals’ natural instincts, recreate their former lifestyles while they’re in captivity, teach them to identify with their own species, avoid raising them in close proximity to people. We must nonetheless recognise that in the majority of cases captivity has direct and irreversible consequences for the animals’ behaviour.
We may infer many things about ourselves and our sexual identity from the character in King Kong – the blonde, the lover or the gorilla who ravishes women – with whom, without actually admitting it to ourselves, we identify.
Despite the crude nature of the special effects used in the 1930s to animate the beast, you identify with the gorilla. You don’t say a word to your mother. To lie, you’d have to speak.
Imprinting consists of getting a wild animal used to a human presence as early as possible by hand-feeding it. The animal will take its feeder for its mother, it will fix on the image of the species which has raised it, and it will consider itself a human. If we then make it rejoin its fellow creatures, it will struggle to concede the similarity between itself and them and will consider them to be strangers or, worse, enemies.
You get used to leaving your bedroom unlocked, you don’t even feel the old desperation to lock the door. You recognise that your mother is your mother, and your father is your rival and enemy, you reproduce the patterns, you embed the functions, you are imprinting.
Every time a new King Kong comes out, the special effects do more, so that the creature, reduced to a puppet in the earlier films, gains in psychological complexity with every remake. As the real animals disappear, the cinema offers us ever more ambitious, moving and almost human substitutes. The gorilla’s humanity is the sign of its dying out.
You don’t necessarily like people who go crazy for blondes, much less people who ravish women. But when the ravisher is a gorilla, you are guilty of lenience.
The animals must maintain their psychological well-being since, being required for intensive reproduction, to restock the wilderness, they have to hang on to some aspects of their past, we mustn’t let them lose touch with everything. We wean the mammals slightly early so that the females come into heat again sooner, we remove that obstacle because we know that while they’re looking after the babies they won’t fall pregnant again, we just move on a bit faster, we save time so as to get better results and more specimens.
The handler has become an animal breeder. He separates the mothers from their young, not for any psychological benefit but in line with the requirements of profitability. It’s as good as proven that motherhood is prejudicial to sex drive.
You stop observing yourself altogether, you have no wish to look at yourself in the mirror nor to see your body change, you assume the constraint, you don’t like partners of your own species, you are imprinting.
Restocking nature with wild animals demands that we breed them before they become extinct but the breeding process considerably transforms the specimens and can sometimes make reproduction, learning and knowledge transmission extremely difficult. We are condemned either to the ongoing disappearance of species, or to the introduction of captive-bred bears, panthers and elephants fated to remind our descendants of some of the aspects of life in the wild that we have lost. Living animals will soon become museum pieces.
Once, when everything is going swimmingly and your parents already consider you a model adolescent, you rebel. From this occasion, you learn that it’s much more effective to impose your will by means of discreet but deep-rooted resistance than by a raised voice and anger. You are imprinting.
A female orangutan will live with her mother up to the age of five and stays close until she is six or seven, when she first falls pregnant. She will not leave her mother completely until she has learnt how to give birth and how to nurse. If the chain of learning and imitation is broken, the female orangutan will not know how to raise her young. She will expel her infants without understanding, will take no interest in them and, without human intervention, the baby orangutans will starve to death, crying pitifully. We feed them by bottle while the mother looks on, hoping that this repeated gesture from behind a protective window will function as a lesson, as a historical trace and a reminder to the female, who’s been deprived of her own mother and recreates the privation by leaving her newborn to itself.
You hope you won’t have to stay with your mother until the birth of your first child. At the same time, you do nothing to make things change. You only leave your room for meals. You still don’t lock your door, you make sure all your gestures are perfectly controlled and your behaviour is irreproachable. No one visits you. Only family enters your territory. You are imprinting.
As I wasn’t managing to teach the female orangutan to look after her little one after the birth, I suggested showing her films of another female nursing her newborn. I even thought of leaving her to turn on the TV, so she could decide when she was ready to watch the looped programme we set up for her. It was entirely possible, we’ve already tried this with chimps turning on radios and even, if there’s a poor signal, twiddling the dial until the voice is clearly audible. For monkeys just as for humans, cinema, radio and television can help with learning.
After meals, you stay to watch TV with your parents. You let them choose the programmes, which you watch without any impulse to assess their quality. You intensify your passivity. Slowly but surely, you are imprinting.
Despite the techniques of reintroduction into the wild and gradual liberation, as trialled by researchers, imprinted animals will have great difficulty adapting to the once-natural environment; they may seek sexual partners that aren’t among their own species and, once they’ve reached sexual
maturity, will tend at times of reproductive activity to attack humans, whom they’ll view not as dangerous outsiders but as rivals.
Up to the age of sixteen you never go to the cinema without your mother. You keep boys at a distance. You have few friends. You rarely leave the family circle. You are imprinted.
I’ve had thirty-five years of life shared with that female, that’s rare even among humans. So, when a problem came up, when they had to give her some medicine because she hadn’t shat for a week, it was me they called. I opened the door, I went in, I gave her her medicine on a spoon, you get a little adrenaline buzz, this was after all the same lady orangutan who bit off one vet’s finger and twice bit her handlers really badly, but she and I know each other well and we have mutual respect.
The more dangerous the animal seems, the more we respect it. Respect for the other is a means of pacifying the world, particularly when the other is already estranged. Offering the other the impression of equality is an excellent device for taking control.
To Leave with the Reindeer Page 5
