The transportation of exotic animals from far-flung places to the UK is by no means exclusive to the Anthropocene. For hundreds of years, Western colonizers, explorers, and naturalists have been amassing “specimens,” both alive and dead, under the guise of collection, research, and display. However, in the present day, a burgeoning global biodiversity crisis places the relocation of exotic animals to the UK in a new context. As Jozef Keulartz notes, “human-aided relocation of threatened species may be required when their historical ranges have become inhospitable due to climate change or habitat fragmentation and destruction, and when moving on their own to other regions where environmental conditions are more suitable is impossible.”[1] A decade has passed since Keulartz made this worrying prediction, and since that time, researchers, commentators, and scholars have increasingly linked Anthropogenic climate change and the broader event of the Anthropocene with the dispersal of exotic species to sites of ex situ conservation.[2] This pattern of dispersal and captivity, especially the movement of large, vulnerable species to the UK, prompts a question apart from the well-trodden debates around captivity, and one that is at the heart of this article: Can these animals ever be assimilated into the UK landscape, and visually, how might that manifest?
A well-documented contestation to zoos and other parallel institutions (wildlife parks, safaris, aquariums, etc.) is that captivity is unethical and cruel, often placing animals in spaces that are unsuitable due to size, climate, and other conditions. Influential thinkers such as Dale Jamison have argued that zoos are ethically indefensible and should be abolished.[3] However, such essentialist claims seem increasingly unfit to describe the current terrain of conservation. Claims that exotic animals should simply “go back to where they are from” appear equally simplistic given that many zoo animals have been born and bred in captive environments and would not easily adapt to wilderness. Furthermore, such claims, whilst speaking to the ideal of animal liberation, neglect the realities of the Anthropocene as habitat loss engulfs wild spaces globally.
In the UK, the response of zoos and wildlife parks to claims of inadequacy and neglect has been to lean into narratives of conservation and education in order to balance critiques made against the use of wild animals for frivolous entertainment.[4] The result seems to be “wilder,” larger, and less curated spaces for animals. In two particular cases—the polar bear enclosure at Jimmy’s Farm & Wildlife Park in Ipswich and the rhino enclosure at the Cotswold Wildlife Park—exotic species are assimilated into spaces that might have previously been considered bucolic or emblematic of British countryside. The resulting visuals are not only odd, but also speak to a conflict at the heart of conservation debates: That between the need to conserve a sort of Ark of animals in the event of mass extinction (members of threatened species kept in controlled, captive environments despite mass extinction in the wild) and the need for ethical spaces that prioritize the needs of those animals.
Here, using photographs of these institutions and Amitav Ghosh’s framework of the “environmental uncanny,” I will elucidate the ways in which the ideological and physical histories of the zoo haunt current conservation efforts, leaving marks that bleed through attempts to reframe the agenda and purposes of such institutions. Such marks tend to be both revealing and unsettling in what they tell us about our relationship with nature, specifically exotic species.
Cotswold Wildlife Park
“Every Home Should Have One” (cover image), a photograph taken by Graham Dickson, depicts a white rhinoceros at the Cotswold Wildlife Park. In the background of the image is a manor house originally commissioned by William Hervey in 1804 and designed in a popular style of the period by William Atkinson.[5] The gardens of the house were opened to the public in 1969 and have been central to the wildlife park since 1970. The architecture of the house is inextricable from the ideals of the English landed gentry—prestige, power, and history. As such, the image makes for an interesting artefact; the exotic intruder on such a historic land is a spectacle for the eyes that demands comment, and yet there is an unease, a disconnect between the setting and the animal. There is no cage or chains, no curated exhibit to frame the capture and display of the rhino in a way that is cohesive to a British cultural imaginary of captivity.
Amitav Ghosh’s framework of the environmental uncanny, typically applied in a literary context, refers to the actions undertaken by non-human agencies whose consequences manifest in unexpected or unpredictable ways, but on reflection can be understood as the consequences of human actions.[6] In Uncanny and Improbable Events, Ghosh notes that “nonhuman forces have the ability to intervene directly in human thought. And to be alerted to such interventions is also to become uncannily aware that conversations among ourselves have always had other participants.”[7] Dickson’s photograph, in this way, might be understood as the meeting point of two intersecting lines—the history of this manor and its inhabitants and the lives of generations of rhinos that have produced the animal pictured. This is no simple story of capture and display, but the confluence of a history of displacement, breeding, and adaptation.
More than anything, Dickson’s photograph speaks to the fractured agenda of visitors who want to conceive of zoo animals as “free” for their own conscience, but who feed into an overarching imbalance of power by funding institutions who keep animals in captive environments. The resulting visual culture is one that omits the conventional cage, but is still ultimately tethered to the reminder that human actions both at the institutional level and globally have led to inhospitable conditions for endangered species like the white rhino in the “wild.” The uncanny discomfort of assimilating exotic animals into the landscape of a historic England reminds us that both a physical and symbolic displacement is at play.
Jimmy’s Farm & Wildlife Park, Ipswich
Ghosh argues that “it is no coincidence that the word uncanny has begun to be used, with ever greater frequency, in relation to climate change” as “no other word comes close to expressing the strangeness of what is unfolding around us.”[8] Commuters on the train from London Liverpool Street to Ipswich may now recognize a perplexing landmark on their journey. Four polar bears—Tala, Flocke, Ewa, and Hope—at Jimmy’s Farm inhabit the hillside that runs parallel to the train track, proving an unlikely I-spy subject against the archetypal sheep and cows of the English countryside. Pat Waldron’s photograph, below, shows Flocke and Tala lounging on the grass by the pond beside a tree trunk.
[Image description: Two polar bears stand on a grassy bank beside a pond with murky brown water at Jimmy’s Farm.]
There is perhaps no animal more heavily encoded with the imagery of anthropogenic climate change than the polar bear.[9] As such, discourse around polar bear conservation dominates both public forums, such as wildlife magazines and charity advertisements, and scholarly debates. There is no more poignant reminder of what is at stake in the Anthropocene. Whilst the same oddness of the out-of-place applies to Waldron’s photograph, the iconography of the charismatic yet endangered polar bear against the vegetation of the “farm” speaks to the slippery nature of conservation narratives. A fundamental tenant of Ghosh’s environmental uncanny is that the strangeness of the Anthropocene is rooted in the ways we are reminded of the potentially devastating consequences of climate change. Whether having our roof ripped off by a hurricane or seeing a polar bear on the way to work, these consequences disturb our routines and shake our realities, put into motion by our own actions.
Whilst animal rights campaigners have contended that captivity is indicative of our symbolic domination over nature and our unethical treatment of animals as objects for capital gain, I contend that the landscape of conservation in the Anthropocene has the potential to uproot simplified narratives of this nature. The zoo, a space that once spoke to human domination over nature, now proves a morally loaded stage on which the biodiversity crisis slips out of our hands. Endangered species, who find themselves in symbolic Arks like the wildlife park, the safari, the aquarium, and the zoo, act as visual reminders that assimilation into new landscapes might not come as naturally as we wish them to. A simple “return home” has been rendered impossible by the actions of our own hands.
[1] Jozef Keulartz, “Captivity for Conservation? Zoos at a Crossroads,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 28, no. 2 (2015): 336.
[2] George Holmes, “What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Biodiversity Conservation in the Anthropocene?,” Environment and Society 6, no. 1 (2015): 87-108.
[3] Dale Jamieson, “Against Zoos,” in In Defense of Animals, ed. Peter Singer(Blackwell Publishers, 1986), 108-117.
[4] Ben Minteer and James Collins, “Ecological Ethics in Captivity: Balancing Values and Responsibilities in Zoo and Aquarium Research under Rapid Global Change,” ILAR Journal 54, no.1 (2013): 41–51; Ben Minteer and Christopher Rojas, “The Transformative Ark,” in A Sustainable Philosophy—the Work of Bryan Norton, ed. Sahotra Sarkar and Ben A Minteer (Springer International Publishing, 2018), 253–71.
[5] Trevor Rickard, “The Manor House at the Cotswold Wildlife Park,” Geograph, September 1, 2009.
[6] Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Penguin, 2016).
[7] Amitav Ghosh, Uncanny and Improbable Events (Penguin, 2021), 35.
[8] Ghosh, Great Derangement, 52.
[9] Dorothea Born, “Polar Bears as Cultural Symbols,” in Communicating Endangered: Species Extinction, News and Public Policy, ed. Eric Freedman, Sara Shipley Hiles, and David Sachsman (Routledge, 2021), 151-165; Margery Fee, Polar Bear (Reaktion Books, 2019); Michael Engelhard, Ice Bear (University of Washington Press, 2017).
*Cover Image: “Every Home Should Have One,” Graham Dickson. Permission granted by Graham Dixon.
[Cover Image Description: A white rhinoceros in the foreground grazes on grass surrounded by trees and shrubs. In the background is a gothic style manor house.]
Edited by Nina Foster; reviewed by Lívia Regina Batista-Pritchard.