Zookeeper and We Bought a Zoo: Zoo Animals as Human Salvation

Zookeeperand We Bought a Zoo: Zoo Animals as Human Salvation

            Although films documenting worldwide quests for zoo animals highlight the need to fulfill orders to create a profit, contemporary films reflect the current emphasis on zoos as biodiversity-conservation nonprofits whose aim for ticket sales is maintenance of the zoo, its animals, personnel and its education programs. The focus on entertainment continues, however, as a way to facilitate higher attendance. Research from BioScience magazine and Journal of Zoo and Wildlife Medicinefrom the late 1980s forward illustrates this shift to conservation rather than entertainment for profit. But they also highlight the tension between animal welfare, which concentrates on individual animals and species, and conservation, which emphasizes biodiversity and the more holistic organismic approaches to ecology.

This tension is illustrated well in two recent fictional zoo films: Zookeeper and We Bought a Zoo. Although both films demonstrate the benefit a zoo may hold for its owners or zookeepers, they approach animal rights and animal welfare issues in different ways. Whereas Zookeeperrecalls earlier appeals to individual animals, as do the 1950’s Jungle Cavalcade and Zoo Quest and the1960’s Hatari, We Bought a Zoo responds to the current conservation ethic embraced by most zoos, as well as the tensions between animal welfare and conservation inherent in the zoo ideal, while it draws on the conceit of talking animals found in the Dr. Doolittle films.

Zookeeper not only anthropomorphizes animals for human benefit, drawing on animal rights principles. It also asserts, as do earlier animal capture films that wild animals benefit from their zoo enclosure, as long as zookeepers treat them humanely. In Zookeeper, zoo animals break their vow of silence because Griffin, their favorite zookeeper, may leave his post as lead zookeeper to win back his lost love Stephanie  (Leslie Bibb). To keep him from leaving the zoo for a position as a car salesman, the zoo animals decide to provide Griffin with the advice he needs to regain Stephanie’s love without losing his zoo-keeping skills. Ultimately, Griffin follows the animals’ advice and successfully rekindles his romance with Stephanie.

But Griffin also learns lessons about friendship and identity from the zoo animals and his experience as a zookeeper that highlight the individualist leanings of animal rights and welfare arguments. Griffin certainly benefits from his connection with the zoo and its animals, accruing a personal profit, perhaps, from his friendship with zoo animals. But these zoo animals’ similarity to humans (one of the main tenets of the Animal Rights movement) is also emphasized by the film. According to Peter Singer, for example, “Animal Liberation is Human Liberation too” (vii), and “human equality … requires us to extend equal consideration to animals too” (1) and preserve their rights as we might other human rights, as in the Civil Rights or Women’s Rights movements. Creatures capable of feeling pleasure and pain, in Singer’s vision, have the same rights as humans because their “sentience” gives them inherent value. From Peter Singer’s groundbreaking 1975 work, Animal Liberation to Norm Phelps 2007 overview, The Longest Struggle: Animal Advocacy from Pythagoras to PETA, animal advocates base their arguments on the close connection between humans and nonhuman animals.

 Joe the Lion (Sylvester Stallone), Jerome the Bear (Jon Favreau), Donald the Monkey (Adam Sandler), Bernie the Gorilla (Nick Nolte), and Janet the Lioness (Cher) all provide very human advice in perfectly spoken English, demonstrating their sentience and clear resemblance to humanity. But Griffin’s response when he declares his love for Kate takes that connection further. Not only do animals resemble humans. Humans also share similarities with zoo animals, the film asserts. Kevin explains his wild reaction to Kate by drawing on elements of the animal world: “Well, when an eagle finds its perfect mate, they cartwheel, right? That's what they do. They... they lock their talons together, and they spin out of control, and just before they hit the ground... they break apart. The only difference between me and an eagle is... I will hit the ground, as you've just seen.” Zookeeper takes its animal rights argument into the realm of the fantastic, but it still resonates. Even though its message that animals thrive in a zoo environment may contradict some animal welfare claims, the film connects nonhuman and human animals, emphasizing the worth of individuals over the environment as a biotic community.

We Bought a Zoo also foregrounds the advantages humans may gain from interacting with zoo animals, but unlike Zookeeper, the film moves beyond promoting individual animals to the detriment of a biotic community and makes a conscious effort to show how zookeepers can help provide the most ethical and humane conditions for them both at the beginning and end of life. Although the film primarily addresses the evolution of a family recovering from the loss of wife and mother, perhaps because it serves as an adaptation of Benjamin Mee’s 2008 memoir of his own experience buying and renovating the Dartmour Zoological Park in England, We Bought a Zoo: The Amazing True Story of a Young Family, a Broken-down Zoo, and the 200 Animals that Change their Lives Forever. The film amplifies tensions caused by new zoo ownership by infusing the narrative with a strong family melodrama, but the zoo experiences illustrated in the film align well with those of recounted by Mee in his memoir, even in a U.S. setting. In the film adaptation of We Bought a Zoo, Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) must comply with current zoo regulations that draw on animal welfare ethics. But he also must learn to move beyond individual animal rights and prepare for “end of life,” a preparation that not only helps Mee move forward a stagnant mourning process but also highlights the film’s more balanced approach to animal welfare. Unlike Zookeeper, We Bought a Zoo valorizes both the welfare of individual animals and a biotic community of interconnected species.

The family melodrama in We Bought a Zoo is both caused and partially resolved by Mee’s wife Katherine’s (Stephanie Szostak) death. Her passing has left Mee as the primary caretaker for two children, seven-year-old Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones) and fourteen year old Dylan (Colin Ford). To renew his relationship with both children and facilitate their recovery from this tragic loss, Mee quits his job as an adventure journalist and, with help from Rosie, sells their home and buys a dilapidated zoo. As he tells the realtor, Mr. Stevens (J.B. Smoove), “We just want new. We want new… new everything. New opportunities. New schools. Just new.” Because the zoo is so far from town and the friends he left behind, Dylan resents the move. Rosie thrives immediately. Ultimately, the zoo helps Mee reconcile with his son, Dylan, and come to terms with his wife’s untimely death. Within this simple narrative, however, are authentic portraits of a zoo and its animals, images that validate an animal welfare approach that includes organismic environmental views drawn from Aldo Leopold’s land ethic and an interdependent biotic community.

Benjamin Mee’s description of the zoo to his brother Duncan (Thomas Haden Church), demonstrates one way the film moves beyond animal rights arguments because it emphasizes the work of the zoo to preserve endangered species: “It’s only two zebras. And a lion, and a jaguar and forty-seven other species, seven of which are endangered, and all of them are saved the second we make this deal.” But it is Mee’s changing relationship with Spar, an elderly tiger, that most illustrates the film’s more balanced approach to animal rights. Head zookeeper Kelly Foster (Scarlett Johansson) provides details about Spar and a nonhuman animal worthy of respect during a conversation she has with Rosie: “That guy there, that’s Spar. He’s our oldest. He’s seventeen. He’s a Bengal tiger. You know tigers have a special sensor in the front of their two-inch canines. They can actually detect the pulse in your aorta. So when they attack, they bite you, take your pulse with their teeth, reposition those suckers and boom! There goes your carotid.”

Benjamin Mee, however, makes a personal connection with Spar, perhaps using him to help replace the loss of his wife, Katherine, so he attempts to prolong Spar’s life no matter how difficult kidney disease and other ailments make it for him. When Walter Ferris (John Michael Higgins), the zoo regulator, explains that he should “begin to draw up an end of life plan” as “art of the humane care of an animal,” Mee denies the “end game of [this] big cat” is near, claiming, instead, “it’s fine.” When Spar refuses to eat, then, Mee attempts to coax him, seemingly connecting Spar’s situation to that of his wife, declaring, “Come on, man. We talked about this. You’ve gotta eat that food. It’s got all the meds. You know, there’s a major buzz for you inside that meat. Your neurotransmitters are gonna be firin’ away all the way to the moon and back. … Buddy, if you don’t eat the food, and you don’t get your meds in you, it all goes downhill very fast. I’m telling you the truth.” Just like his wife during her illness, Spar too might go downhill fast.

Yet the film argues against this anthropomorphizing of Spar. Instead, Mee’s evolution as a zookeeper and father are demonstrated by his acceptance of Spar as a suffering animal, who deserves an end of life plan. After Spar’s humane passing, they post a plaque in remembrance and use a drawing of Spar that Dylan created as the new zoo logo. Other scenes highlight the film’s attempt to provide an authentic picture of zoo ethics. Enclosures are expanded, for example, to better accommodate some species. But the film also maintains a clear separation between human and nonhuman animals. Humans care for the zoo animals but also provide them with lives as close to that they would live in the wild as possible. Instead of equating zoo animals with humans as in Zookeeper, We Bought a Zooprovides a balance of animal welfare and conservation ethics, even within a primarily comic family melodrama.