As I may have mentioned, I'm no great fan of zoos; at worst they seems little more than prisons where humans gawp at the inmates, not all of whom are kept in decent conditions; at best, well, ...<\/p>\n
I never dreamt, however, that humans were once exhibited in zoos, but we [*<\/strong>] were. \u00a0I learnt this from a drama about the Berlin Charit\u00e9 hospital in the late 1890s. \u00a0And yet I could hardly believe it, so I looked it up to make sure; and my view of humanity \u2013 already pretty dim \u2013 dropped another notch or two. \u00a0It was a widespread practice, it seems. \u00a0And don't think it didn't happen in your country because it likely did. \u00a0At the very least you might try to find out.<\/p>\n How did I not know this already I asked myself. \u00a0We Europeans have kept very quiet about this shame. \u00a0What were we thinking? \u00a0Well, I think it's pretty obvious what we were thinking. \u00a0The practice went on well into the 20th century and some of the pictures on these websites are hard to bear.<\/p>\n For more details, see this BBC report<\/a> from 2011, this feature<\/a> from popularresistance.org<\/em> in 2014, and this<\/a> from\u00a0theplacidzebra<\/em> in 2015.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, I see that at the August CITES meeting, European zoos persisted with their campaign to be allowed to continue to import young African elephants. \u00a0Inevitably, they say this is for \"conservation\".<\/p>\n ........................................<\/p>\n *<\/strong> The \"we\" here is disingenuous. \u00a0\"we\" \"civilised\" Europeans weren't exhibited; we were the ones doing the gawping. \u00a0It was \"lesser\" peoples who were subject to scrutiny.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As I may have mentioned, I'm no great fan of zoos; at worst they seems little more than prisons where humans gawp at the inmates, not all of whom are kept in decent conditions; at best, well, ... I never...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7549\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}