Tired of Being an Orca: Ontic Burnout in Zoo Animals

Zsuzsanna Chappell writes about how our theories of justice and injustice from human-centred social philosophy can apply to zoo animals.

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Imagine that you are born on an arkship hurtling through space, away from a destroyed Earth, and towards a new habitable planet light years away. On your tenth birthday you find out that given the cosmic distances your spaceship needs to cover, you will always live inside the tiny metallic structure, and only your great-great-great-grandchildren will be free to live in a natural environment again. This is one small part of the intricate plot of Anthony Doerr’s novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land. Would you want to continue on with your mission? Would you want to have children at all? You are confined because you are a member of a dying species. Your value lies simply in the kind of being you are, not in your identity as an individual.

This scenario mirrors the lives of many zoo animals living in captivity. Well-run zoos claim to perform a number of useful functions: education, research, conservation, entertainment for humans. Those animals unwittingly involved in conservation efforts find themselves in the same situation as humans on an inter-generational ark ship. They live in an impoverished environment, working towards their descendants repopulating a natural environment. They are representatives of a species, rather than individual animals in their own right. Just as in Doerr’s tale, no one asked them for their consent at any point. Many of these animals, – apes, parrots, whales, dolphins, and so on, – are highly intelligent and while they do not reason like humans, we have no idea if they would assent to being treated this way. I don’t want to argue that conservation, research, education, or even entertainment are not worthwhile goals. However, our conceptual toolkit around injustices suffered by humans might help us understand why expecting zoos to fulfill these functions is problematic.

On the one hand, zoos encourage us to treat animals as unique individuals by naming them, letting us know their exact date of birth, giving them backstories, and so on. On the other hand, they treat these same animals in a way that is incompatible with (quasi-)personhood. Maybe, as Abigail Levin writes, we are making a mistake when we treat zoo animals as unique individuals or quasi-persons, and in reality they are just another generic member of their species. Levin discusses the case of Marius the giraffe, an animal at Copenhagen Zoo that was deemed unsuitable for breeding, euthanised, dissected in front of an audience in the name of education, and then fed to the lions in the name of enrichment. Ultimately, Levin argues for treating zoo animals as unique individuals, and actively pursuing interspecies friendship in zoos. 

It is credible to think of some animals as quasi-persons when their keepers and handlers describe them as having individual traits, maybe even amounting to personalities. But in that case, can we still treat them as just another member of a species, turning them into part of a breeding programme? How about education, interspecies friendship, and entertainment? Some zoos claim that their animals are ambassadors: they teach you about who they are, encourage you to value their species more highly, and think of animals as your friends. This is one of the justifications offered for orca shows at marine parks such as Sea Life Centre. While at first glance these aims might seem worthwhile, they become problematic once we take into account the distress caused to animals by these practices. Zoos are busy, noisy, over-stimulating environments for many of us, even without having to be on display or perform in shows. Would we, humans, choose to be captive performers in such a public place, even in exchange for a comfortable home with a lifetime of having our needs met?

The way in which zoos turn animals into anthropomorphised quasi-persons allows us to make these comparisons which would look silly if we stuck to conventional views of non-human animals. Once we develop these analogies, it also becomes easier to think about the ways in which various injustices philosophers are now discussing in much more detail in the case of humans might be applicable to zoo animals as well. 

Katherine Jenkins defines ontic injustices as wrongs which people experience merely because they are a certain kind of social being: a woman, queer, neurodivergent, disabled, and so on. While animals exist independently of humans, we categorise them as “endangered species” or “suitable for display in zoos”. These are socially constructed categories. When we lock animals in zoos (or humans on generation-ships) based on their endangered status, they become merely representatives of that species, and they also suffer the injustice of imprisonment based on their identity as “endangered animals”. This becomes even more poignant when we remember that just over a hundred years ago Bronx zoo exhibited an African man as part of its great apes collection. When we treat non-human or human animals like this, we no longer see them as individual beings capable of flourishing or suffering, but only as members of a species. 

In captivity, many animals display anxious, repetitive behaviours, often resulting in injuries. They show signs of aggression, boredom, or numbness. They do not have access to adequate exercise. Their health may be compromised even in the best run zoos. (All this is also true about incarcerated humans.) Orcas are a good example in that they are suited especially poorly to life in zoos. According to one 2017 study, “captive orcas persistently grind their teeth on tank walls, often to the point where nerves are exposed. These ground-down spots remain as open cavities, highly susceptible to infection even if caretakers regularly flush them out with clean water.”

Captivity in zoos takes a psychological and physical toll on animals that in some ways mirrors burnout in humans. Furthermore, it mirrors a specific kind of burnout: burnout due to being a member of a certain group created by humans. Gerry Dunne calls this kind of burnout in humans ontic burnout. Looking at examples in education, Dunne and Kotsonis “a form of interminable explanatory fatigue brought on by repeated requests to educate the privileged about what it means to be oppressed”. In the case of zoos, captive animals are expected to have humans fall in love with them so that we become more interested in conservation and positive environmental change. They are used as exemplars of what their types look like, so that human children and adults can see real-life orcas, chimpanzees, parrots, snakes, or dung beetles, rather than looking at pictures and videos. These demands for education, research, and rewilding through breeding programmes can put an enormous burden on animals.

I wrote at the start of this post that all of these aims, – education, research, conservation, even entertainment, – are worthwhile. But using some of the concepts developed for injustices experienced by humans can help us to question whether they could be achieved in ways which are less burdensome for individual animals, through measures such as running breeding programmes in semi-wild populations living in sanctuaries which are part of their original habitat.