Stopping Stereotypes

Sometimes I feel that on this blog, I spend more time talking about social issues than animal ones.  It's unavoidable, I guess.  Zoos function as part of society, and so many things that we do have a role in the broader context of social, economic, political, and cultural issues.  Sometimes, we can have impacts that we don't anticipate.

The shootings in Atlanta this week have aimed a spotlight at anti-Asian sentiment in the country, much of which is focused on China being the country of origin of COVID-19.   The general consensus is that the disease first crossed over from wild animals to humans in a wildlife market.  Such markets, where live wild animals are in close contact to humans, often in unsanitary conditions, do provide ample opportunity for disease transmission.  Wildlife trafficking is a serious threat to many species, both in East Asia and around the world, including the United States and western Europe.  So, on the one hand, this was an opportunity to spread awareness about this problem and how to fight it.

On the other hand, this also allowed people with anti-Asian biases - especially anti-Chinese - to spread the stereotype of Asians as dirty, ignorant "others," eating all sorts of weird, "gross" things and spreading diseases to the rest of the world.  It's a distorted, exaggerated picture, but has served to further the divide in the minds of some westerners that Asian culture, and its practitioners, are disgusting, wrong-headed, and recklessly responsible for the current predicament that we find ourselves in.  From there, it's not a far jump to some people taking that stoked hostility and converting it to open violence, as we saw with tragic results in Georgia.

China, to be sure, is a big country with a lot of people and has an enormous environmental impact.  Their government has not always, to be sure, been one at the forefront of wildlife conservation (or human rights).  Still, sometimes I think that we, being the rest of the world, use them as a boogeyman, a scapegoat.  Whatever we do that's wrong, in any context - political, environmental, economic - we tell ourselves that China is worse, and therefore what we do doesn't really have an impact.  We pollute and contribute to climate change?  Well big deal, people will say - China pollutes more.  We're not the reason that species are endangered, we insist - it's those Chinese looking for aphrodisiacs (a belief which is greatly exaggerated in the states) or delicacies.  We've convinced ourselves that we can't be the bad guys, because China is the worst guy.  

All of this, of course, ignores that many Chinese conservationists and citizens who are, in fact, working to protect wildlife and in other ways make the world better.

We don't need to censor our conservation talks or ignore the fact that there are some environmental challenges which are complicated by China.  Yes, demand for body parts of certain animals in traditional medicine, such as pangolin scale and rhino horn, is a driver in the decline of those species.  This isn't an all-or-nothing conversation.  But we should be mindful of the languages and images we use so as not to inflame bias, discrimination, or violence against fellow humans (including fellow Americans of Asian descent, who have no connection to whatever went on in Wuhan). 

Besides, it's not like the US has hands that are spotlessly clean on wildlife or conservation issues.  We don't have to ignore what's happening around the world, nor should we, but it wouldn't be the worst idea to also focus on the conservation challenges we have here, which our guests are probably in more of a position to have a direct impact on.

The following two graphics were produced by the facebook page "Zookeeper Problems" as a learning tool for zoo educators.