The Observer

Zoos are the opposite of educational: they construct fictions about their captives

Martha Gill

Joanna Lumley’s call to free UK elephants has exposed flaws in conservation claims

Sun 22 Oct 2023 01.34 EDT

Every afternoon at London Zoo until the early 1970s a table laid with cups, saucers and a teapot would be set out for the chimpanzees. An amusing set piece was anticipated: chimps throwing crockery at each other and jumping on chairs. But there was an early complication.

Chimpanzees are exceptionally good at mastering tools. They quickly learned to use the pot correctly and would sit politely at the table, taking afternoon tea.

“When the public tea parties began to threaten the human ego, something had to be done,” Frans de Waal writes in Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?. “The apes were retrained to spill the tea, throw food around, drink from the teapot’s spout.” Being fast learners, they excelled at this, too – establishing a routine with comic flair, popping the cups in the teapot when the keeper’s back was turned. The ruse worked. Contemporary newspapers reported the animals behaving with their “usual unselfconscious abandon”.

The chimps had done something unnerving in those early days. Their display of competence challenged not only the egos of their audience but the very premise of the zoo itself. If animals were capable of sense or even sensibility, this collection of cages and cells might start to look a little sinister. Less like innocent entertainment, perhaps, and more like a sadistic sort of prison. It was in the interest of zoos to teach customers the opposite lesson. The zoo became a place of fiction, a sort of anti-educator. It couldn’t quite tell the truth about the animals it housed.

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- Martha Gill is an Observer columnist