A (Sometimes) Serious Business

Years ago, when I entered the field, one of the first things I did was sign up to join AAZK - the American Association of Zookeepers.  A month later, when my first copy of AAZK's journal, Animal Keepers Forum, arrived in the mail, I felt... well, professional.  I spent a big part of that evening sitting up and paging through it, reading the scholarly articles that my colleagues had contributed on a number of topics.  It felt mature, adult, serious.  I wasn't a glorified janitor.  I was a member of a professional organization that did serious work for a good cause.  

Years later, when I saw my own name in the journal as the author of an article, I felt like I was making an important contribution to the expansion of professional knowledge.  I was very proud.

The other day, I saw the AAZK had updated its logo.  It certainly was... a choice.

I'm always fearful of sounding like an old curmudgeons, but I get irked sometimes at the tendency of zoos to infantilize their field.  There's a popular cultural misconception that zoos are for children.  Sure, kids and their parents are an important part of our demographics, and we definitely should plan for them in our facilities and our mission.  Sometimes, however, I feel like we lean too heavily in that direction.  I don't want to gatekeep and make our profession and our campuses too highfalutin and exclude younger audiences.  But I kind of miss the days, which I sometimes feel like I was too young for, when zoos were seen as serious scientific institutions that were on par with other museums. Making ourselves too childlike - logos, graphics, signage, promotional materials - can detract from that.

This isn't about my ego or wanting to feel like an adult or a respected professional (well, okay - maybe a little).  If zoos are just about being a cute place to take small children, and serve no higher function in the eyes of the public, they cease to be important institutions and become something easily dismissed - maybe something easily outgrown.  It becomes a lot harder to justify our work if we're on the same cultural plane as Chuck E Cheeses, a glorified venue for birthday parties.  We WANT kids to come, and we WANT them to have fun, and we WANT them to have a friendly experience.  But we also have to deal with weighty scientific issues of welfare and conservation.

Perhaps I read too much into as colorful, cartoonish new logo.  But I wish that zoos and their affiliate organizations sometimes would present themselves as more mature institutions.