Abnormal Animals

Stereotyped pacing, self-biting, coprophagia, and other such behaviors have long been observed among animals in menageries and zoos. Yet it was only in the mid-twentieth century that such phenomena were scientifically problematized as abnormal—as deleterious modifications of natural behavioral norms due to captivity, specifically, anthropogenic modes of enclosure and exhibition that inadequately transposed natural environmental conditions. In the course of the biological modernization of zoological gardens, abnormal animal behaviors became knowable as psychological maladjustments to be remediated through productive biopolitical interventions. Reading zoo biologists Heini Hediger and Monica Meyer-Holzapfel, their psychological interpreters such as Henri Ellenberger, and philosophers of abnormality Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault, this essay will elucidate the scientific knowledge and practices that identified these abnormalities and sought to ameliorate them, thereby producing their own unrecognized transformations. It will also reflect on the more general significance of this dynamic for human-animal relations in the behavioral anthropocene.