Managing Love and Death at the Zoo: The Biopolitics of Endangered Species Preservation

[...]except on the margins of this discourse, there has been little recognition that we must also consider how nonhuman animal life is caught up in apparatuses of biopower: from the management of wilderness reserves, to industrial food production, to the monitoring and culling of feral urban populations, to our relationships with pets and companion species, to the projects, in which zoological gardens participate, of endangered species preservation.1 What this work helps to make clear is the ambiguous nature of this conservationist biopolitics in zoos. The prevalence of species-thinking, in which each individual is only perceived as a token of its inexhaustible taxonomic type, made such losses acceptable-as each animal was in principle replaceable. [...]every zoo 'specimen' that was viewed by the metropolitan masses trailed innumerable extinguished lives and other forms of harm and disturbance to the composition of generations and ecologies. The responsibility and burden rests entirely with the zoo apparatus: these lives only exist in the first place through its programmes of assisted reproduction. [...]this rational violence is compounded by the absence of any question of viability: a sovereign decision is made to 'put down' completely healthy creatures simply because they are not considered to contribute to the genetic future of their own species. Clearly, however, they are not learned in captivity; thus '"deficiencies" from the viewpoint of reintroduction to the wild ... also reflect successful adaptations to captive environments' (Beck et al. 7). [...]it is that animals accustomed to the distorting 'Eden' zoos attempt to provide-free of disease, predation, hunger and danger-find themselves 'returned' to thoroughly unfamiliar and dangerous environments.