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This Would Be a Nice Place— If It Weren’t for the Visitors On August 30, 2003, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch printed a letter to the editor that’s worth reprinting here. I noticed in Deb Peterson’s July 31 column that the Saint Louis Zoo is studying whether to expand the area of taxation to support the Zoo’s programs. While I love our Zoo and am proud of its programs, I would not personally support it until I can once again visit it in safety. I have contacted Zoo administrators at least three times, requesting that they discontinue the sale of balloons, which put latex into the air and are dangerous for anyone with a latex allergy. Balloons are lovely and fun, but they are not a necessary part of Zoo operations. I discontinued my Zoo membership, since I can no longer visit, at least not on busy summer days. I would definitely object to being taxed to support an institution so unresponsive to a legitimate medical request. I was, I have to admit, one of the people the author of the letter talked to about her latex allergy. I didn’t point out that many people (including myself) are allergic to cats. If I had pointed that out, I probably would have gone on to say that my allergy isn’t a good reason for us to stop our work with Siberian tigers. I did say that the balloons actually generated quite a bit of revenue for the zoo and that the vast majority of our visitors seem to enjoy them. I don’t 233 15 remember what else I said, but I’m sure I was unfailingly polite. I’m also sure that the whole time I was talking, I was thinking to myself, “This would be a pretty nice place—if it weren’t for the visitors.” What makes a zoo a zoo, as opposed to a theme park on the one hand, or a research center on the other hand, is our mix of missions. We are, most certainly , serious scientific institutions. But no one visits research institutions, or at least very few of us do. People do visit theme parks, but with the exception of Disney’s Animal Kingdom, the Sea World parks, and a handful of others, they don’t afford visitors an opportunity to learn much, if anything, about the world around them. The fact that zoos fall somewhere in between is our greatest strength and, at the same time, our greatest weakness. In an article for the Washington Post, Jeffrey Hyson, who is writing a cultural history of zoos, talks about the early formation of the National Zoo. At the time of its founding in 1889, the advocates for the zoo envisioned an essentially “scientific” enterprise. It was to be largely closed to the public with only a few acres open to visitors—in other words, a research center that hosted a few guests. That ideal was never really given any practical consideration . The people of Washington (and, more importantly, the congressmen who were asked to provide the funding for the new zoo) didn’t want to see what Hyson calls “charismatically challenged species” such as pronghorn and elk, both of which were in dire need of conservation at the time. They wanted to see exotic species—lions and tigers, elephants and apes. As it turns out, the National Zoo does have a wonderful research facility that is, indeed, closed to the public. It’s called Front Royal, and an incredible amount of conservation research and breeding are accomplished there. But the zoo itself is more or less entirely open to the public. From a research and conservation point of view, having all those people coming in makes life very difficult. But we’re not just about that. We’re also about educating people or, to my way of thinking, getting people to care more for living things. Obviously, this means we want people to visit; in fact, having them visit is a very large part of the reason for our continued existence. Still, there are days that I have to remind myself that if it weren’t for the visitors, I’d probably be out of a job. People visit zoos for a variety of reasons. Certainly one of them is an opportunity to see animals that they would otherwise never get to see. Like any museum, there is a premium placed on seeing...

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