The concept of animals like tiger salamanders experiencing neoteny - staying as perpetual juveniles - is a fascinating biological principle. But what if it applied to other animals?
When I first started in zookeeping, the zoo that I worked at had an old bear exhibit. Well, not that old, really - it was built in the 1980s - but with its small size and relatively stark features (like many "natural" bear exhibits of that era, it was mock-rock and a waterfall-fed pool), its limitations were becoming quite known to us. The brother-sister pair of American black bears that lived in it had seemed perfectly content when they were acquired as cubs - small, easily amused with toys and enrichment - but now that they had grown, the exhibit was seen as increasingly unsatisfactory.
"It's too bad that they don't have a pygmy bear that just stays the size of a cub," one keeper remarked to me one day as we walked by the viewing windows.
I pondered that for a moment. "I think that's just a raccoon," I replied.
More than once in my career, I wished that I could just hit the pause button on an animal's development and keep it frozen in time. Usually it would be to keep an animal young when its fun and playful; many species grow more aggressive with age (cassowaries, for example, are allowed to freely wander the village streets of their native New Guinea as youngsters, before they became savage as adults). At other times, it would be fun to pause an animal at one time of year - some ungulates I've worked with, for example, have been perfectly pleasant for much of the year, but become monsters during rut, to the point where it would no longer be safe to share space with them.
That, of course, all limits oneself to the fantasy that you could just hit "pause" and not "rewind" - because the greatest pleasure then would be to watch your animal live of its life, learn from it, and then, towards the end, go back to the beginning to do it all again, but doing better with the lessons you've learned.
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