rs may be kept in easy jobs. To the end,
secondarily, that the least intelligent minority of the population may
have an idiotic show to gape at on Sunday afternoons, and that the young
of the species may be instructed in the methods of amour prevailing
among chimpanzees and become privy to the technic employed by jaguars,
hyenas and polar bears in ridding themselves of lice.
So far as I can make out, after laborious visits to all the chief zoos
of the nation, no other imaginable purpose is served by their existence.
One hears constantly, true enough (mainly from the gentlemen they
support) that they are educational. But how? Just what sort of
instruction do they radiate, and what is its value? I have never been
able to find out. The sober truth is that they are no more educational
than so many firemen's parades or displays of sky-rockets, and that all
they actually offer to the public in return for the taxes wasted upon
them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit
to a penitentiary, or even to Congress or a state legislature in
session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.
Education your grandmother! Show me a schoolboy who has ever learned
anything valuable or important by watching a mangy old lion snoring away
in its cage or a family of monkeys fighting for peanuts. To get any
useful instruction out of such a spectacle is palpably impossible; not
even a college professor is improved by it. The most it can imaginably
impart is that the stripes of a certain sort of tiger run one way and
the stripes of another sort some other way, that hyenas and polecats
smell worse than Greek 'bus boys, that the Latin name of the raccoon
(who was unheard of by the Romans) is _Procyon lotor_. For the
dissemination of such banal knowledge, absurdly emitted and defectively
taken in, the taxpayers of the United States are mulcted in hundreds of
thousands of dollars a year. As well make them pay for teaching
policemen the theory of least squares, or for instructing roosters in
the laying of eggs.
But zoos, it is argued, are of scientific value. They enable learned men
to study this or that. Again the facts blast the theory. No scientific
discovery of any value whatsoever, even to the animals themselves, has
ever come out of a zoo. The zoo scientist is the old woman of zoology,
and his alleged wisdom is usually exhibited, not in the groves of actual
learning, but in the yellow journals. He is to biology wh
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