HE follower Reed Barker asked this morning if I think that yesterday’s exotic animal massacre in Zainesville, Ohio, may prompt 20th Century Fox to delay the release of Cameron Crowe‘s We Bought A Zoo, currently slated to open on 12.23.
No, I doubt it. The film won’t open for another two months; people forget and move on. But it does underline — remind — that there’s something fundamentally selfish and anti-nature about keeping exotic animals inside pens and cages.
Consciousness about zoos has changed over the last few decades. Zoos are intriguing, yes, but obviously not cool. This feeling would have been there without yesterday’s massacre, but it’s probably been intensified. It’s not right to sentence animals to life terms in prison, however loving and compassionate their guards/keepers may be.
Remember that Twilight Zone episode called “People Are Alike All Over“? Space traveller Roddy McDowell crash-lands on a planet, and the natives wind up imprisoning him in a cage that looks like a typical modern American home so the curious can look at an “Earth Creature In His Native Habitat”?
