What There is to See at the Zoo (James Response Essay)

This essay by Marianne Moore describes some of the things that you can see at the zoo when you go to it. She is trying to make the point that the zoo is full of interesting things that should be respected and that we should be interested in them. Fine. But who didn’t know that already? Who hasn’t been to a zoo? Who doesn’t already know that animals are different from people and that it is good to be interested in animals? It seems to me that the writer Marianne Moore is trying to make a deeper point, but using simple ideas like a child’s trip to the zoo to make them.

So what are the points Marianne Moore is making? Firstly, she wants to tell her readers about some of the animals that she sees in the zoo. She tells us that zebras are symmetrical and that peacocks have beautiful tails, that tigers have stripes and that giraffes are examples of “marking.” It is the next paragraph, however, which shows us the method she intends to use all the way through. Having given these examples, she then draws something like a moral from them when she says that “Such colors and contrasts educate the eye and stir the imagination.” In my view this is the first point that she is making.

There are more points like this in the essay. She uses many examples to show that animals are interesting, that they are examples of being adapted to their environment, and that humans have to change their behaviour when dealing with animals. This all leads up to the final paragraph, which works as a conclusion. Here, Moore states her belief that we have both privileges in a zoo (because we are allowed to see these fantastic creatures) and also obligations (not to feed them, not to disturb them). It seems to me that Moore is also implying that she has a wider idea of how humans should interact with non-humans. If a zoo imposes these obligations, then don’t these obligations also exist anywhere that humans come into contact with the natural world? Here Moore delicately expresses an environmentalist idea that would not be generally accepted until much later in history. Now we know how badly the world is affected by destruction of animals’ habitats, Moore’s idea is more important than ever.

But it still seems to me that her way of saying this is quite boring and stupid. She could have done something more interesting and still made the same points.