Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America

by Jon Mooallem

In an environmental law review article on the subject, the scholar Holly Doremus criticizes this sort of restrictive wildlife management as “erect[ing] a virtual cage” around animals. Conservation should strive to build healthy populations of animals that are “as wild as possible in a tame world.” But controlling and manipulating animals, or making apologies and payouts for them, effectively amounts to a kind of domestication, changing species “from wild animals to human creations designed to serve human needs.” Just as a cow on a fenced-in pasture meets America’s need for beef, a buffalo scrupulously contained inside a national park meets America’s need for buffalo: perhaps just our aesthetic and moral needs to know that buffalo exist there, and to keep their destruction off our conscience.

virtual cage