Anti Zoo Quotes

It is a fact that if an impulse from one or the other sphere comes up and is not lived out, then it goes back down and tends to develop anti-human qualities. What should have been a human impulse becomes a tiger-like impulse. For instance, a man has a feeling impulse to say something positive to someone and he blocks it off through some inhibition. He might then dream that he had a spontaneous feeling impulse on the level of a child and his conscious purpose had smashed it. The human is still there, but as a hurt child. Should he do that habitually for five years, he would no longer dream of a child who had been hurt but of a zoo full of raging wild animals in a cage. An impulse which is driven back loads up with energy and becomes inhuman. This fact, according to Dr. Jung, demonstrates the independent existence of unconscious.

We built zoos because we are cruel, because we care not about the freedom of others, but only our own freedom, because animals are weak and we love to crush the weak, because we never understood and we are still not understanding that all living things have feelings like us!

The idiots who say they're having a great day at the zoo must know that the animals there are just having a terrible time every day!

I hate all modern art, because it’s mad at God,” he likes to say. Most Catholics have never recovered from that painting of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung all over it. They are under the assumption there are entire museums in New York dedicated to anti-Catholic shit paintings, where all varieties of zoo scat are flung at pictures of the innocent Virgin.

As he was leaving it occurred to him that he would not come back, to this zoo or to any of them. With the elephants more than any of the others, he thought as he left them--as he left behind these great beasts who recognized him when he came, who rumbled and swayed sadly--he could feel them waiting. He had thought at first it was food they were waiting for. Here they were, the last animals, locked up and ogled, who had no chance remaining of not being alone. Here they were, and what he had assumed in his smallness was that they wanted food. It was possible to be fooled by the signs of their animation, in the course of a day. But it was not food that interested them. Food was only a diversion for them, because they had little else. They were not waiting for food, but they were, in fact, waiting. He had not been wrong about that. It was obvious: all of them waited and they waited, up until their last day and their last night of sleep. They never gave up waiting, because they had nothing else to do. They waited to go back to the bright land; they waited to go home.

What programs would a prison need to utilize in order to maximize the likelihood that the people sent to it would renounce violence as a behavioral strategy? To begin with, it would need to be an anti-prison. Beginning with its architecture, it would need to convey an entirely different message. Current prisons are modeled architecturally after zoos — or rather, after the kinds of zoos that used to exist, but that have been replaced with zoological parks because the animals' keepers began to realize that the old zoos, with concrete floors and walls and steel bars were too inhumane for animals to survive in. Yet we still keep our human animals in zoos that no humane society would permit for animals. And the architecture itself conveys that message to the prisoners: "You are an animal, for this is a zoo, and zoos are what animals are put in." And then we act surprised when the men and women we treat that way actually behave like animals, both when they are in this human zoo and after they return to the community. So we would need to build an anti-prison that would actually look as if it had been built for human beings rather than animals, i.e. that was as home-like and pleasant and civilized and human as possible. Once we had done that, we could offer those who had been sent there the opportunity to acquire as much education and/or vocational training as they had the ability and energy and interest to obtain. We would of course need to provide treatment for whatever medical, dental, psychiatric, or substance-abuse problems they had, and would want to incorporate many of the principles of a therapeutic community into the everyday routines of this residential school, with frequent group discussions with the other residents and staff members with training in psychotherapy. The goal would be to replace the "monster factories" that most prisons now are with therapeutic communities designed to enable people who are deeply damaged, and damaging, to recover their humanity or to gain a degree of humanity they had never been able to acquire; in short, to help them heal themselves and learn, in the process, how to heal others and even repair some of the damage they have done.