A giraffe develops a compulsive fear of men with large cameras. Halberstadt writes, "Disorders like phobias, depression and OCD, documented at zoos, don’t appear to have analogues among animals living in the wild."

sublime documentary Blackfish.

: whether there is a good reason for zoos to exist at all.

Last August, the Costa Rican government announced it was closing all its zoos. The new policy, the government declared, was "no cages." (A court ruling has so far kept the zoos open.) I think we're moving slowly toward the same sensibility.

A giraffe who freaks out about men with large cameras, a brown bear whose cage door is the subject of his obsessive compulsive disorder, a 5,000-pound killer whale who shows her trainer who is boss by dragging him underwater for just about as long as he can live,

I think these fabrications comprise a great deal of what zoos depend upon, and what has begun to fail: a kind of double illusion, in which the people are convinced that they are seeing animals in something like their natural state and the animals, most of whom have never lived in the wild, are convinced that they are at home.

A couple of years ago, the essayist David Samuels published a long piece in Harper's on the Bronx Zoo. It got attention mostly for a discovery Samuels made, in the archives, that the leading figure in the early history of the Bronx Zoo was a eugenicist propagandist named Madison Grant who corresponded with Hitler, and saw his work at the Zoo in the same vein, as rescuing the perfect form of a species before it declined.

Occasionally, for the most stubborn cases, he prescribes Prozac.

"Zoos have changed incredibly in the past thirty years," a second-generation zoo director named Mark Reed tells Halberstadt. "These days, moats and glass have replaced cages; there are education departments and conservation initiatives. And full-time vets, antibiotics and better diets have doubled and in some cases tripled animals’ life spans in captivity.”

Sure, SeaWorld's marketing is particularly crass, but if the basic problem is that intelligent, social animals are being kept in inhumane conditions that may be driving them insane, then shouldn't that same principle apply to other species, too? It's hard to think that SeaWorld should be put out of business and not have complicated thoughts about the National Zoo. You can't just stop at the orca; you've got to consider the orangutan.

But there are advantages to being in zoos, from the animal's perspective — safety, mostly, and access to medical care, and the presence of a team of trained professionals who work very hard to entertain and engage you — and the disadvantages of being an animal in a place like the National Zoo have not always seemed to outweigh the security. In retrospect, you can see a form of anti-zoo sentiment building, reflected in films like

One long-term 1983 study

(the zoo eradicationists tend to cite a somewhat melodramatic Rilke poem about a panther caged in a Paris zoo: "It seems to him there are / a thousand bars; and beyond the bars no world"),

But look beyond the flashpoints of today — and the community of nations — and a very different world comes into sight.