A zoo is a wonderful place in which to watch humankind, close up in tooth and claw. Last week's bank holiday was Edinburgh Zoo's busiest in two decades: more than 9,000 souls went through the ticket barrier. Up and down the huge hill they ambled, from the vicuña fields at the summit to the hut at the base that allegedly contains ring-tailed lemurs, the Lord Lucans of the animal kingdom.
It's hard to dispel the idea that a mammoth glass dome has somehow been placed over this sector of Corstorphine and that, way up in the sky, some galactic species peer in curiously and tug each other's sleeves: “Aw, look, he's angry with his wife for leaving the Irn-Bru in the car. Sweet.” But what registers first is the odd preponderance of fathers in Old Firm shirts - odd because this is Edinburgh and Celtic and Rangers are 50 miles away. There's loads of them, flocks of fans in blue and green.
Their presence tells us something interesting about zoos as a family recreation choice: that the working class hasn't quite got round to feeling dubious about them.
In the classic manual-labour nuclear family, zoos remain on the itinerary of acceptable awaydays and outings, along with safari parks and sea-life centres. Inheritors of Thomas Aquinas's idea that animals are food first and entertainment second, they just don't see the problem.
Further up the socioeconomic beanstalk, though, zoos have accrued something of the mark of Cain, considered to be amalgams of prisons and torture chambers. The contention that they help educate those who would never see certain animals in the wild is viewed as a flimsy fig leaf for the reality that a well-run zoo can be a lucrative thing.
In the post-Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) mindset, animals are people, too, and zoos are seen as grisly Victorian relics. The philosopher Bertrand Russell once satirised such tendencies with a pamphlet demanding that oysters be given the vote.
Not that zoos have buried their heads in the sand regarding the problem. “Landscape immersion” is their solution, their strategy for soothing the savage beast of public prejudice. It's intended to counter the tragically traditional sight of chimps and bears pacing concrete enclosures behind wire fences, with only bales of straw and three-day-old fish to remind them of home - what Gary Wilson, Edinburgh Zoo's head of property and estates, calls the “goldfish-bowl effect, where the visitors get to watch the animals becoming stressed by their very presence”.
Landscape immersion strives to place the animals in accurate facsimiles of the habitats they would occupy in the wild, the wildlife equivalent of those mocked-up Victorian streets you find in provincial museums.
Edinburgh has just opened the Budongo Trail, a £5.6m naturalistic rendering of a habitat in Uganda. The zoo's 11 chimps (there is space for up to 40) live within a kind of multilevel Ideal Jungle Show biosphere, clambering over 1,500sq ft of live vegetation and tree trunks, scampering through secret tunnels and climbing up a structure that brings them close to the windows, through which visitors can view them. There's a sizeable outdoor area, too, and in the three main pods light and humidity are controlled to mimic the conditions under the canopy.
It's reputedly the biggest single-breed landscape immersion facility in the world - its larger rivals in Leipzig and in the Bronx, New York, accommodate more species - though it was pipped as Britain's first by a similar attraction at London Zoo, Gorilla Kingdom, which opened in March last year. Undeterred, though, Budongo heralds a £78m, decade-long plan to bring immersion to most species at Edinburgh Zoo.
As with Christmas presents that are discarded in favour of their box, however, my two-year-old son, Joe, whose chief solace in life is a stuffed toy he has named the Funky Monkey, makes a beeline not for Budongo's viewing windows, but towards the brass chimp that sits in the entrance area, beside the board that gives these sullen, flea-nibbling creatures potted cartoon-character biographies: Kilimi, the young female who is “attracting more and more attention from the boys”; Liberius, the nine-year-old who is “beginning to find his place in the group”; and Emma, “a large female with a swollen throat air-sac” (I once worked with an Emma like that).
The immersion concept was pioneered almost 20 years ago at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, where Jim Maxwell is the project manager in charge of such enclosures. “We believe that landscape immersion has been very successful,” he says. “It provides variety, stimulation and space to retreat. We've observed that zoo guests gain a deeper understanding of the interdependence of the animals and their habitat. And, unlike most built structures, the resulting landscapes improve with maturity.”
It's nice to know that even chimps can get an opposable thumb on the property tendril. Not everyone, however, has gone ape over the spread of landscape immersion in British zoos.
The singer Morrissey, who in his previous band the Smiths guaranteed his eternal welcome at children's parties by penning the lyrics “The flesh you so fancifully fry/the meat in your mouth, as you savour the flavour of murder”, expressed his opposition to the Budongo Trail with typical vehemence, arguing that “if parents want to take their kids to Edinburgh Zoo to learn something about animals, they should take them along to a local abattoir instead to show them where their lovely food comes from”.
Now, there are two ways to take this. There's no denying that Morrissey's long had form when it comes to standing up for our dumb chums, albeit in that unblinking, ultramontane way that has you musing how his teenage years must have been fun. Like many who are sentimental about animals, Morrissey seems rather less concerned about people, at least if some of his previous comments are to be believed.
Regarding Budongo, Morrissey also contended that “animals survived quite well for millions of years without any human intervention”, an argument that overlooks the hundreds of species - the bald eagle, the Florida panther, the whooping crane - saved from extinction by precisely the same type of do-good zoological contrition that Budongo and the new future of zoos embody.
The more temperately put position on the advent of landscape immersion is advanced by Will Travers, chief executive of the Born Free Foundation, which runs conservation and animal welfare projects: “Zoos have been grappling for many decades to find the justification that allows them to move on,” he says. “The problem is that I don't think the public are buying it. The public have had plenty of education about habitat loss in the wild, then they go to look at chimps in an artificial environment. It might be a larger, more complex environment than the one they were in previously, but does the chimp care when there is that central fact of artificiality? I can't help feeling that the whole concept of landscape immersion is designed to make humans feel better; the animals, as always, come second.”
There is, as Travers says, a crucial unknowable at the heart of this debate - how acutely do the animals notice their environment in captivity? In his Booker prize-winning, pro-zoo novel, Life of Pi, Yann Martel writes that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is “the animal as seen through human eyes”, arguing that animals can have no conception of such relativistic notions as freedom or incarceration, that essentially the entire argument is based on a fallacy.
At the same time, Claire Johnston, senior keeper of Edinburgh trail, believes Budongo's dividend is quantifiable in the more expansive behaviour patterns the animals have been displaying and their resemblance to the patterns of chimps in the wild. Yet isn't Budongo merely a sentimental approximation of their landscape, designed wholly to reflect and echo a human interpretation of the jungle? To an animal, isn't a landscape without its natural sounds and smells effectively no kind of landscape at all?
“I can't see there's a massive amount of difference,” says Johnston. “Obviously, we can't put other animals in the enclosure because chimps are predatory, and other aspects are bound to be lacking. But the most important thing is that they receive sensual stimulation. It might not be precisely the same stimulation they'd receive in the wild. It's just different, not necessarily poorer.”
Zoos are what are called a cushion debate: you bear the impression of the last person to have sat on you. It would be briefly pleasurable to take the hard line that zoos are nightmarish anachronisms that should go the way of freak shows and child chimney sweeps, but then you remember how nice and well-intentioned zoo personnel invariably seem. And then there are the little ones. Zoos are not for you or me, they're for kids, to extrapolate what they see in picture books and cartoons into three dimensions They're central to the long, slow lesson of making the rendered real, the fabled factual. Animal rights must come second to this, a reality that not even Aquinas or Morrissey could argue with.
