Just Too Beastly for Words

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History's first zoo keeper must have been one very busy conservationist, but at least he was spared the burdensome barbs of animal-rights activists, possibly because they were engaged in self-preservation. All Noah had to do was tend his passengers for 40 days and then turn them loose.

Today Noah would be plowing heavier seas. Not only are zoo managers concerned with the care of their charges, they are also concerned that the zoo, as an institution for research, education and preservation, is becoming as endangered as some of the animals it houses. Financial support has dropped, and costs keep climbing. Rising too is a clamor from critics who claim that zoos are no better than prisons, designed for the amusement of mindless gawkers. The more militant activists want to shut zoos down altogether.

Such is their zeal that a delegation from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) trooped into Washington's National Zoo last Christmas bearing gifts of exotic fruits to remind the beasts of the good old days back home. They serenaded the inmates with heartfelt renditions of God Rest Ye All the Animals and Let 'em Go (to the tune of Let It Snow).

Warthogwash! Michael Hutchins, director of conservation and science for the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums, says the activists are "unrealistic and biologically naive; they are taking human moral precepts and trying to apply them to animals." That view, he adds, may have some merit when it is focused on domestic and farm creatures and even on the plight of laboratory animals, but it has no place in wildlife conservation. "We're trying to save animals from extinction," he says of the AAZPA, which includes 158 of the nation's best-known, most prestigious and carefully regulated zoos and aquariums. "If we were to follow the animal-rights ethic to the letter, it would be a disaster. It would lead to species extinction." Where the activists may have a point, he says, concerns conditions at 1,400 roadside menageries, traveling shows and petting zoos around the country, many of which are substandard and, rightly, ought to be shuttered.

But no such distinctions exist for many activists, who believe zoo keepers are guilty of "speciesism," the movement's politically correct counterpart to racism. Animals, PETA insists, are no different from people and should be treated accordingly. "There really is no rational reason for saying a human being has special rights," says PETA co-founder Ingrid Newkirk, whose credo is "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy."

This means, among other things, that incarceration in a penned environment -- or even an unpenned one, in the most modern and progressive of zoos -- inflicts unacceptable psychological and even physical harm on animals, all to provide diversion for Homo sapiens. Such treatment, say activists, cannot be justified by any beneficial services that zoos perform.