Your responsibility goes beyond the population at the zoo, because it is part of what we now in fancy terms, call a meta population, a population that extends throughout it’s kind every place. So there’s a population of a creature in Chicago, in New York, in the Congo, in Rwanda. A zoo is a global institution, whether it seeks to be or not, if it doesn’t understand that, maybe it should do something else. This also imposes a great deal of responsibility on the quality of the care that it provides to the extraordinarily delicate creatures it cares for. Now consider a human hospital. People there must be cared for with enormous technical sophistication, responsibility and sensitivity, compassion. In a zoo, all of those things are also true, but with many more complications. Not least of which is that the zoo animal cannot tell you where it hurts.
