What Future by Torie Bosch

Author:Torie Bosch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781944700461
Publisher: The Unnamed Press
Published: 2017-10-21T04:00:00+00:00

Before flying to Buenos Aires, I had downloaded the original Planet of the Apes to watch on the plane. I’d forgotten that the orangutans in the story are actually bad guys—evil scientists and upholders of orthodoxy who happily perform brain-ablation experiments on dumb humans. The gorillas are even worse, while the heroes are the chimpanzees, Zira and Cornelius—upholders of non-simian personhood and human rights.

Six hundred miles across the Argentine pampas, in Mendoza, a court is considering the fate of a chimpanzee named Cecilia—the target of another habeas corpus suit by AFADA.

It’s easy to say when you’re on this side of the bars, but I liked the Buenos Aires Zoo, with its arching tipa trees and Victorian architecture—nature merging harmoniously with artifice. I’m glad I got to see it before it closed. The Mendoza Zoological Park was a mess. Reports of dying animals had been in the local news in recent months. On the day I arrived the zoo had just reopened temporarily after being closed for safety reasons by its newly appointed director, Mariana Caram. (Three months later it was closed again, this time indefinitely.)

She was a most unusual choice for the position. A former Fulbright Scholar working in sustainable development, Caram had been collaborating with environmental organizations pushing to reform the zoo. Hired last fall by a newly elected provincial government, she is trying to clean up the place and eventually turn it into an ecopark like the one now under way in Buenos Aires.

She must deal, in the meantime, with the matter of Cecilia, who became a poster chimp for activists after an incident in 2014. A pack of wild dogs had charged through the grounds and killed 27 rheas, a vicuña, four guanacos, and two llamas. During the rampage, one of Cecilia’s companions, a chimpanzee named Charly, died of a heart attack, and, six months later, another chimp, Xuxa, succumbed to what were said to be natural causes.

With Charly and Xuxa gone, Cecilia, the youngest, was left on her own in a concrete habitat, with no vegetation or natural ground to walk on—“one of the most horrible enclosures in the zoo,” Caram said. She hopes the court rules in favor of recognizing Cecilia as a non-human person. In the meantime, discussions are under way about moving her to a sanctuary in Sorocaba, Brazil.

“I know I’m crazy taking on the zoo,” Caram said as we walked from her office to a bear enclosure with a fetid pond that smelled like sewage. Just up the hill, kept out of sight from visitors, was a jail-like building with two more bears. There was no other place to put them. “We talked about non-human persons,” she said, “but do we have the right to keep any animal like this for its entire life?”

Farther along the path was the worst cage of all, packed with more than 100 frantic baboons. “No birth control,” Caram said. Two weeks earlier some of them had escaped, and one injured a girl.

“Look at this—concrete, concrete, concrete,” Caram said as we walked quickly past more cages.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.