Designing for Animal Welfare
Zoo design throughout the world continues to be inspired by the words of Henry Beston who so eloquently articulated the familiar mantra that engenders such deep respect for the natural world. Building on Beston’s remarkable insight, Robert Sommer understo
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Designing for Animal Welfare
They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. Henry Beston
Zoo design throughout the world continues to be inspired by the words of Henry Beston (1928) who so eloquently articulated the familiar mantra that engenders such deep respect for the natural world. Building on Beston’s remarkable insight, Robert Sommer (1974) understood that animals and people alike are victimized or venerated by the quality of their communities. Sommer’s dichotomy between hard and soft architecture delineated the deficiencies of many traditional institutional settings including mental hospitals, prisons and traditional zoos. In a recent publication (Sommer 2008) he extrapolated from an earlier analysis by psychiatrist Henri Ellenberger (1960) who reviewed the parallel history of the zoo and the mental hospital. In eighteenth century England, as Ellenberger noted, the nation’s first mental hospital, Bethlem (known also as “Bedlam”), was as much a tourist attraction as the London Zoo. Some writers characterized Bethlem as a “human zoo” where “oddities and characters” were on display. Under public pressure to change, zoos and mental hospitals have continued to evolve, as Sommer observed: In the best cases, the zoo developed into the wild animal park with natural habitat, discreet display, and animals in natural groups . . . separated from the public by moats rather than bars . . . In the mental hospital field, new pharmacological treatments shifted the emphasis . . . from hospitalization to outpatient treatment. (p. 378)
The key similarity among mental hospitals, prisons, and traditional zoos are the powerful negative effects of confinement and sensory/social deprivation. Over time, a life in hard confinement induced unusual if not bizarre behavioral adaptations (classified as deprivation acts) such as catatonia, coprophagia, regurgitation/ reingestion, stereotyped rocking and pacing, head-banging, and other self-injurious behaviors. These behavior patterns are frequently idiosyncractic in form; for example, polar bears and other swimming mammals are prone to developing swimming T.L. Maple and B.M. Perdue, Zoo Animal Welfare, Animal Welfare, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-35955-2_8, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
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8 Designing for Animal Welfare
Fig. 8.1 Hard architecture at the zoo teaches the wrong ideas about wildlife (T. Maple)
stereotypies in aquariums and zoos. A severely disturbed patient in California’s Stockton State Hospital exhibited stereotyped locomotion backwards. The stereotyped behavior of confined autistic and developmentally disabled humans are known to be a function of prolonged social deprivation, providing vestibular, tactile, visual, and auditory stimulation not provided by caretakers (Baumeister and Forehand 1973; Thelen 1981). Psychologists continue to study the similarities and the differences in the way animals and people respond to confin
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