One Keeper's Farm Animal...

Years ago, an alpaca at a zoo where I worked died.  It was pretty unexpected, as she had appeared to be in decent health, and we were all rather shaken up about it.  Of course, a keeper is seldom allowed to grieve in peace.  Sprinkled among the condolences that we received - a tiny but bitterly unpleasant speckling, like arsenic flakes sprinkled over a sympathy sundae - were a few snide comments and attacks.  One of which claimed that this was perfect proof that alpacas were better off in the wild.


Even in our sorrow, we all had a collective head-spin.  "Wild... an alpaca?  There's no such thing!"  She might as well have waxed philosophically about wild Chihuahuas (now there's an image).


There are a handful of domestic animals in our zoos that many visitors mistake of wild animals.  These are the llamas and alpacas, as well as their cousins the dromedary and Bactrian camels, the yak and reindeer and water buffalo.  A few of these do exist in wild forms (as in, there are wild yaks and water buffalo and reindeer in the world), but the ones seen in zoos are almost certainly domesticated, countless generations removed from the wild.  There are no "wild" dromedaries anywhere, nor have there been any for centuries.  The closest we have are feral ones, let loose in Australia, of all places.


These are farm animals, as sure as pigs and cows and sheep are.  The difference (besides the fact that they aren't intensively factory-farmed, like our livestock in the US tends to be) is that they are someone else's farm animals.  They are not familiar to us and so, when seen on TV, or in a book, maybe the zoo, we misunderstand their relationship to us.  A visitor who sees a dromedary alongside zebras and antelope and giraffes may conclude that they are wild, roaming free in unmanaged herds just like the other animals.


Perhaps a more realistic set up would be to incorporate these animals into farmyard exhibits, painting a more detailed picture of our relationship with domestic animals - how reindeer help nomadic people survive in the subarctic, or how the domestication of the camel facilitated the exploration of the world's deserts.  It might also be fun to explore why these animals were domesticated and not others?  When Europeans first entered the Serengeti, why were they not greeted by cavalry of Maasai warriors mounted on zebras?  Why are there so few domesticated animals from the Americas?  What made the wild boar a better candidate for domestication than the warthog or peccary?  Why are reindeer, a single species, domesticated in the Old World, but not in the New)