Following Themes

When I was a kid, for a while I got really into the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  They were fun stories to get lost in, but even as a young kid, two issues stood out to me.  One, they were kind of racist... in the same way that water is kind of wet.  Two, after a while, they began to get a little formulaic.  Every single novel seemed to be about Tarzan and his friends stumbling across yet another lost city - this one from Atlantis, this from the Middle Ages, this one from Ancient Rome.  Towards the end, I was wondering how there was any room left in the jungle for animals - the entire place seemed to be filled to the brim with lost cities, one right after another.

Burroughs would doubtlessly have approved of modern zoos, with their unabashed adoration of rainforest exhibits built around temple ruins.  I've commented before on the somewhat overused trope of jungle temple exhibits, as well as the rationale that goes into them.  Temples are but a single example of what has become an increasingly popular trend in zoo exhibits - theming.  This is the incorporation of non-animal elements into zoo exhibits in order to heighten the visitor experience.  In some cases, the theming can be focused on human artifacts and culture, such as the aforementioned temples, as well as totem poles in North American exhibits and land rovers in African savannah exhibits.  In other cases it can be themed around natural elements.  The local zoo that I visited as a kid had a ginormous TV tower not far outside the gates, dominating the landscape whenever you looked in that direction.  My dad would joke that they should have been more considerate of the zoo visitors when they'd installed it and disguised it as a termite mound - a 700 foot tall when - so it wouldn't detract from the experience.

Photo Credit: ZooChat, loxodonta

Theming can be a controversial element in zoos.  It takes money to design and install it, money which, arguably, could be better spent on more animal-centric components.  A jaguar cares little if the rock ledge that it is resting on looks like a Mayan ruin or a park bench.  The benefit in this case is for the public, not for the animal.  Done correctly, theming can help educate visitors about the animals and their environment.  An artificial termite mound installed in a giant anteater exhibit, for example, can be used to show how the animal feeds naturally, instead of just out of a slop bowl.  If done poorly, especially in cases where it's a cultural element, it can lead to confusion or offense.  For example, totem poles have been used in arctic exhibits for polar bears... despite totem pole cultures being found much further to the south.

Another challenge with theming is that, in attempting to evoke a specific landscape or region, it can lock a facility in place should it try to diverge from that original exhibit theme.  When The Baltimore Zoo opened its new arctic exhibit, Polar Bear Watch twenty years ago, just as much of a highlight as the bears was the Tundra Buggy, an enormous arctic exploration vehicle which had been driven into the zoo, parked in place, and had the exhibit built around it.  Visitors would enter the Buggy and look out the windows to observe bears, just as tourists in Manitoba, Canada would do.  It was a very innovative exhibit idea... which fell apart a bit when the zoo got out of having polar bears a few years ago.  They could have tried to have gone with sloth bears or Andean bears, both endangered species in need of more holders - but neither would have made much sense with a giant, now-immobile Tundra Buggy looming next to their habitat.  The exhibit now features grizzly bears, which sort of works, but not really.

While Baltimore (now the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore) had polar bears, the theming for the exhibit was a great asset, allowing the zoo to do something unique and interesting while educating visitors about a specific habitat.  In the absence of that species, the theming became a limitation, rather than an asset.