Recently, NBC news televised a segment on Knut, the famous polar bear living at the Berlin Zoo. A web search can pull up dozens of links in 2007 regarding Knut and his rise to celebrity status. He made the front cover of Germany’s edition of Vanity Fair, he garnered his own daily show on Germany’s main ARD TV channel, his image graced debit cards and children bought toy Knuts and wore polar baby t-shirts, Scholastic brought out a book… and on and on…
But this past week I listened while two television anchors joked…joked…about Knut’s increasingly bad behavior. The piece was short and it was mentioned that Knut is now deemed mentally ill. The impression I was left with was that this sweet baby polar bear had grown to be a problem child. All on his own.
In the January 25, 2008 article, “What turned cute little Knut, the polar bear, into a psycho”, Daily Mail writer Jane Fryer reports: “Knut has found himself the focus of a major international debate about the rights of caged animals.” Fryer notes Knut’s profit benefit to the Zoo, “Knut had become a huge furry cash machine, attracting more than 400,000 extra visitors over the past year, pushing profits up by £7million and doubling the value of the zoo’s shares.”
According to The Independent, “Knut is turning into a ‘psychopath’” (January 28, 2008): “German activist Frank Albrecht said that animals born in captivity end up being divorced from nature and turn into hyperactive, disturbed freaks, because they become too dependent on man.”
Bernhard Blaszkiewitz, CEO of Zoologischer Garten Berlin AG, told Bloomberg.com, that Knut “…is getting bigger and fatter. We’re not expecting the Knut boom to continue this year.”
To recap: Cute, soft, fuzzy, needy, dependant, unique baby polar bear bonds with human caregiver who plays music at night to put Knut to sleep. Then, surprise!, baby bear grows and grows and grows. He no longer fits in Daddy’s lap, in fact “Daddy” sustains bruises trying to cope with supersize Knut. Denied of human interaction, Knut becomes a big ol’ grump. Or, perhaps a teenage grump? Or a terrible-two sort of grump… Anyway, he is declared mentally ill, maladjusted.
Where to start?
Is the problem with the Berlin Zoo who capitalized on Knut? I guess we’d need to know what came first, the Knut or the cash-egg. Do zoos see dollar signs the minute a furry mammal is expecting?
Or is the problem with zoo’s decision to save Knut’s life in the first place? Apparently, he had been rejected by his mother. Zoo powers-that-be and compassionate-I’ll-sleep-in-his-cage trainer saved Knut, giving him the love and attention he needed. Right?
Polar bears spend the first three years of their lives close to their mothers…in the natural world, which probably isn’t much like the Berlin Zoo, no matter how wonderful the zoo might be.
The Nuremburg Zoo, when faced with a similar situation, let nature take its course and watched as the mother killed her two polar bear cubs. On C2NN (news, video and more for a conscious world) a petition is listed to encourage zoos not to allow baby polar bears to be killed by their mothers. “So if zoos won’t help to save the lives of animals, what are they for?” C2NN asks. C2NN is glad the third cub, named Flocke, was rescued when the zoo intervened.
Like a lot of issues, in today’s world we are all connected by technology and information comes to us directly, often without anyone to provide the intellectual background. We’re expected to do that for ourselves.
Is there a philosophy of zoo culture? Are zoos all bad, all good, or somewhere “just right” as Goldilocks would say?
Maybe the problem is with us; yes, let’s assume that for a moment. Maybe we want too much. We want to see things for ourselves, up close and personal. We want to have the biggest and best and most rare and the revenue that comes with it. We want to save things, though I read that polar bear population is relatively stable with about 26,000 in the wild right now. We want to study things, photograph things and make stuffed animals.
We don’t, as a rule, like the parts of nature where mothers kill their offspring. Where lions catch the gazelle. Most of us live so far removed from nature, it’s difficult to sort all this out. Maybe Knut’s mother only has that murderous gleam in her eye because she’s living in captivity.
I’ve heard more than one “parrot person” declare that “parrots don’t bite in the wild.” Having sustained their bites in domestic situations, I find that hard to believe. And yet, if I had my wings clipped and lived inside four walls, no matter how nice those walls were, I’d want to bite someone too.
Poor Knut. He was raised to love humans, and now he does. But humans are disappointed in his muddy fur, his loud growl, his big body, the pathetic way he holds his favorite object, a leather glove…
I hope that Knut and Flocke will open the debate on how we care for non-domesticated animals, and how we cage them, and what we expect from them. And how comfortable we are with leaving them be and enjoying them through the lens of a camera or the pictures and descriptions in a book. While they may need our care, our science, our conservation efforts, “our” nature preserves, they don’t really need our friendship to be happy. Not at all.
I’m not saying it was wrong to save Knut and Flocke. But it’s wrong to expect an animal to be anything other than it is, and if we make it more human-like, then we’d better be open-hearted in how we care for it the rest of its life.
What do you think?
