Zoo Animals

What do people think about when they look at animals in zoos? 

Research has shown that the average visitor spends thirty seconds to two minutes per enclosure (Mullan and Marvin 1999). Visitors barely watch the animals, and ignore the educational signs about them. After visiting the zoo, for many visitors, the take home message is that humans are superior to other animals, according to social ecologist Stephen Kellert (1979, 1997).

But what do zoo animals think about their lives, while people are watching them? There's no real way to know, of course. 

Daniel Zakharov is a photographer whose series Modern Wilderness focuses on the daily lives of animals. In these images, which feature the lives of zoo animals, we see the animals engaged in the limited activities that their captivity allows them: pacing, sleeping, watching, and thinking, perhaps, as Alison Nastasi writes, about the conditions of their own existence.

Introspective animals

We don't know, not for sure, what our companion animals are thinking. And we certainly have even less of a chance of knowing what's going on in the minds of wild animals.

But that doesn't stop us from trying to find out. Part of the fun of creating captions for animal images online is trying to get inside of animals' heads.

The introspective animals are, to me, one of the more interesting of the animal macros, because the creators have done more than just come up with a funny caption, as is the case with so many lol animals. Instead, there's an attempt to get at a relatively deep thought which could very well be bothering the animal in question. Sometimes, as in the case of the introspective bear, the bear is really just a stand in for a person who doesn't know what he wants (and refers, by the way, to the well known fancy cats meme), but in the case of introspective pug, I think he really is wondering whether, in fact, he is a good boy.

Of course, we'll never really know, and neither will introspective pug.