Raising Good Environmentalists: Do You Zoo?
We zoo. We’re lucky enough to live an hour from the Indianapolis Zoo, and it’s the regular destination for a day trip when preschool is canceled, or dad’s got a day off of work, or a co-parent just absolutely has to have the house to themselves for at least eight hours or someone will have to shell out for marriage counseling.
We zoo, and so real-live lemurs and ostriches and boa constrictors are a familiar sight to my little Midwestern girls. They know about different environments, because the tigers live near the cafe over in the jungle habitat and the giraffes live way past the playground over in the plains. They know that different animals live together differently, because they saw the meerkats in the desert habitat all playing and fighting and humping each other, while the sharks in the oceans exhibit basically just ignore each other while swimming around looking predatory. They can tell which elephants are which in the elephant habitat, and which dolphins are which in the dolphin dome.
But at what price does this manufactured intimacy come?
