Last Chance to See

by Douglas Adams

“See the way it’s so interested in everything it can see?” said Richard. “It lives by its eyes, and you have to remember that when you keep them in captivity. You must make sure they have a complex environment. Birds of prey are comparatively stupid. But because they’ve got such incredible vision, you’ve got to have things that will keep them occupied visually. “When we originally started breeding birds of prey in captivity, we brought in some very skittish birds, and whenever anybody went past the aviary the birds just went mad, and we thought they must be upset by the disturbance, and someone came up with the bright idea of what’s called a skylight and seclusion aviary. All four walls were opaque and just the roof was open so that there was no disturbance for the birds. But what we found was that we’d overdone it. The offspring that were born in those environments were basket cases because they hadn’t got the sensory input they needed. We’d got it completely the wrong way around. “I mean, animals may not be intelligent, but they’re not as stupid as a lot of human beings. You look at the primate areas in some zoos that are equipped with green metal architect-designed ‘trees’ that, in a minimalist sort of way, reproduce the shape of the tree, but don’t actually include any of the features that a monkey might find interesting about a tree: leaves and bark and stuff. It may look like a tree to an architect, but architects are a lot more stupid than monkeys. We just got a bro...