Madam, - I visited Dublin Zoo earlier this week for the first time in over 40 years. It was a deeply depressing experience. The sight of tigers and jaguars padding endlessly around a field, or lying motionless in a corner of the field, obviously bored out of their skulls, was profoundly disturbing. Other animals displayed a similar reaction to captivity and being stared at by human beings. The lion in its cage disdainfully turned its back on the viewing public.
At one stage, an oran-utang looked through a glass partition at me and I wondered what he was thinking and perhaps he wondered what I was thinking. I remember reading many years ago that the philosopher René Descartes believed animals were little more than machines, and that philosophers generally believe the main difference between us and them is that animals are incapable of self-consciousness. A visit to the zoo might shake that belief.
A visit to a zoo is certainly guaranteed to bring out any latent feelings of misanthropy in the visitor. Whatever about man's inhumanity to man, man's inhumanity to animals is truly appalling. There is absolutely no excuse for removing magnificent beasts such as lions, tigers and leopards from their natural habitat and imprisoning them in confined spaces, just so that human beings can stare at them.
Perhaps homo sapiens should be renamed homo crudelis, because our attitude to animals is yet another example of our propensity towards cruelty and badness generally. - Yours, etc,
JOE PATTON, Chapelizod Court, Dublin 20.