Like Las Vegas and housewife-based reality television, it’s impossible to stroll through a zoo without a pang of moral discomfort — the slow, swelling realization that beneath this spectacle throbs genuine suffering. It’s perhaps what makes Los Angeles — a city that becomes grimier the longer you look at it — the ideal setting for one. Here, hundreds of neon-clad partygoers line up to attend Roaring Nights at the L.A. Zoo, a semiregular event that promises 1980s-themed cover bands, alcohol, and even a silent disco.
This particular Saturday night in July, the ethical disaster of zoos feels too thorny a subject to contemplate. So here I am, waiting in line with two friends who agree that observing animals is one of life’s purest joys.
The zoo makes us queasy, but our eagerness to make our way inside is undeniable. We love hippos and monkeys. Despite our age and cynicism, we discuss the feeding tactics of sea otters with childlike enchantment.
As we march along various paths, we’re elated to find seals, alligators, and snapping turtles. I snap a photo of an alligator obstructed behind a thick wire. We stop by a meerkat who, standing atop a boulder, keeps careful watch. It’s an image plucked out of a nature documentary — only here, the meerkat’s kingdom is a cemented walkway where visitors in neon headbands gawk at him while sipping sodas. It feels especially ironic to ogle a rattlesnake in an enclosure (as my friend observes, Griffith Park is already home to so many rattlesnakes). Still, the sun is setting; it’s been a pleasant summer day. We’re surrounded by a middle-aged crowd, who seem delighted to be out on a Saturday night holding drinks and making small talk to the chirps of exotic birds in the distance. A man in a Hawaiian shirt catcalls me. I joke to my friend that tonight, I am an animal to be commented on too.
An ’80s yacht rock band plays. Jimmy Buffett songs vibrate through the zoo. We approach orangutans who seem baffled and unsettled by the music. “What a world we live in where orangutans can hear ‘The Piña Colada Song,’” I remark to my friends. The statement unsettles me immediately. A zookeeper assures us that the orangutans have been given the option to “participate in the music” or go into their enclosure. Suddenly, I am agonizingly aware of the animal enclosures, the air of captivity, the buzz of electric fences. The noise overwhelms. And yet a silent disco breaks out — so as “not to disturb the animals.”
On our way out, protesters hand us pamphlets. We thumb through these, which tell us that zoo animals are miserable. I nod my head furiously as the activists speak, dutifully studying their handouts. I desperately want them to know I agree, that I am a good person who cares. I need them to know I am not like everyone else, leering at orangutans to the sound of the band. I love “Consider the Lobster”!
Even as the thoughts occur to me, I know that none of them matter to the animals behind bars and wires, looking woefully back at us.
