Native Americans believe the animal world teaches humans how to live close to the earth, and to be respectful of and in harmony with the natural world.

In the hierarchy of reincarnation, in both Hinduism and Buddhism, humans have the highest status. Being born an animal is the result of bad karma in a previous life. All three Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — believe humans are the highest creation, which makes them responsible for the wellbeing of the earth and its creatures, and all prohibit cruelty to animals.

Ecclesiastes 3:19 of the Old Testament says, “Man has no superiority over beast.” The Quran explains in Surah 6:38 that, “All the creatures that crawl on the earth and those that fly with their wings are communities like yourselves.”

All three religions believe animals have souls and are to be valued as God’s creation.

Whether they believe themselves to be superior to animals or not, humans have always been fascinated by the animal kingdom.

Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894) and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes (1912) inspired an endless array of children’s stories. By the time Disney cartoons made their appearance, the stories had only animal characters rather than the relationship of humans and animals.

The idea of animals standing in for humans is not a new one and can be traced back to the ancient Indian Panchatantra and Aesop’s fables (6th century BC). Using animals as metaphors allow the moral stories and messages to be less confrontational.

Post-Darwinian curiosity about the nature and behaviour of animals grew with the founding of the National Geographic Society in 1888, now spread across the world through the Nat Geo Channel.

Hugh John Lofting wrote letters to his children from the British Army trenches of World War I, creating the much beloved Dr Dolittle, a vet who can talk to animals. Along with the three film versions made, it seeded the idea that animals are not just a herd or a species, but have individual personalities.

Despite our love for animals, we destroy more and more of their habitat. The extinction of species such as the dinosaurs has been the result of natural phenomenon, but humans have speeded up the process through overhunting and encroaching their natural habitats.

Modern zoos believe their role is to raise public awareness and develop breeding programmes, like a “Noah’s Ark”. However, the very worst place to see animals is in a zoo. No matter how big an enclosure, it cannot compare with the several thousand square miles an animal has in the wild.

Zoos have a dark history. Although private bestiaries were popular from Egyptian times, public zoos are a colonial legacy. Established to reflect European authority over distant lands, they were places of spectacle. Behind the collections is the capture of animals taken from their community by wildlife traders — not unlike the capture of humans for slavery.

The 19th century pioneer of modern zoos, Carl Hagenbeck, captured animals in nearly every continent of the world to be exhibited in European cities, including human “savages” — Nubians and Inuits. He trained animals for circuses in Europe and the USA. To his credit, he eventually realized zoo animals need natural surroundings, not tiled cages.

The Karachi Zoo was also established by colonialists in 1878. Dr Sohail Ansari had written an excellent history for Dawn. Dr A. A. Quraishy, who was a zoo curator from 1953 to 1983, established the Safari Park in 1970, intending to transfer the Zoo to this location — an unfulfilled dream. In the meantime, animals are humiliated daily in miserable enclosures, managed by indifferent staff and visitors come away with little knowledge of the animals they have seen.

Margi Prideaux, in her article, ‘Zoos Are the Problem, Not the Solution to Animal Conservation’ writes that zoos “are unable to accommodate more than the smallest fraction of the world’s 22,784 species that are threatened with extinction.”

Do we need zoos when there are excellent animal documentaries? Is conservation not better served by natural reserves and rolling back the destruction of animal habitats?

Durriya Kazi is a Karachi-based artist.
She may be reached at durriyakazi1918@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, October 17th, 2021