Originally published at: Zoos as colonialist enterprises | Boing Boing
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I’ve still got mixed feelings about the fact that for many years Disneyland had an “Indian Village” in Frontierland with real tribes as an attraction.
https://www.yesterland.com/village.html
By the standards of the day it was apparently fairly authentic and respectful (better than what folks saw in that infamous sequence in Peter Pan, anyway) but still…
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I’ve always wondered why the tiger in Blake’s great poem “The Tyger” is not at all a fearsome looking beast.
Scholarly commentary says the tiger looks confused because it’s “in the forests of the night,” and not enlightened, which seems like a bit of a reach. I used to think it was because Blake had never seen a tiger. In Blake’s time (around 1800) if any city in the world had a zoo with a tiger in it, it would’ve been London. So now I’ve come around to thinking that, although he was a brilliant poet, Blake was a pretty primitive artist.
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Doesn’t really compute as given. On the other hand animal-constructed boundaries and concessions against human built environment (or just cars) has a ways to go.
…how Blake could rhyme “eye” with “symmetry”.
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I also just never got the impression Blake was a fan of The Enlightenment, what with equating Newton with night and sleep.
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Symme… try (as in ‘fry’) 
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I’ve got it!
What immortal hand or knee
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
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This book, among other things, describes zoos before europeans got their vulgar little hands on them
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