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Leonard Woolf, in his 24-page satirical pamphlet, Fear and Politics: A Debate at the Zoo, was published in 1925 and was the seventh work in the first series of Hogarth Essays. In the work, Woolf explores the inherent attributes of the human condition from a highly ironic viewpoint, presenting his argument through the discourse of animals. Victoria Glendinning (Leonard Woolf: A Biography) categorizes the work as a “satirical squib” and describes how “the supercivilized zoo animals hold a debate after closing time to discuss Man.” The elephant, all too familiar with human nature, states emphatically that, “Human beings delude themselves that a League of Nations or Protection or armies and navies are going to give them security and civilization in their jungle.” Glendinning not only aligns the heritage of Woolf’s essay with the caustic social critiques of Swift and Kipling but also observes that Fear and Politics “casts a beam ahead toward Orwell’s Animal Farm” (Glendinning 240-41). By situating the essay in the context of its hereditary, genetic elements, Glendinning highlights how Woolf’s work is also passed on to another heir.

Zoo Renewal is not an attempt to explain away or fix that sinking feeling we might experience when looking at a living animal in its zoo enclosure; its tonalities may well exceed interpretation or remedy. But given the extreme presentism of zoos today combined with an environmental futurity that leans heavily on children, inquiring into the not-so-distant past and the urban specificity of bad zoo feelings is a necessary critical procedure. The question worth answering is not, as Berger might have posed it, why do people feel bad at the zoo, but what are the idioms and interactions through which feeling bad has been cultivated, amplified, relieved, and disavowed? The stories that follow reorient us in this direction and toward the analytic practices required for their telling.

Chapter One, focuses on the seminal role of the “naked cage” as a widely condemned design staple by tracking its iterations across radically different sites of zoo revitalization, and the specific ways in which it incited a shame historically felt and marshaled by white middle-class liberals.

Chapter Two traces the revitalization of the National Zoo through twenty years of master planning. I situate changes in the zoo’s physical geography as symptomatic of and responsive to a civic culture gripped by the shame of its decline and the promise of uplift.

Chapter Three follows the acquisition, exhibition and breeding of Mohini, a magnetic female Bengal white tiger. I argue that Mohini’s varied bodies both reinforced and jeopardized the zoo’s reconstruction as a breeding ground for white racial identities.

Chapter Four investigates the suburban attitudes and borrowed views embedded in San Diego’s zoo designs by reading the planning and promotion of their open-air, mixed species exhibits against a regional history of race and real estate.

Chapter Five takes up the regionally specific ways that planners of San Diego’s Wild Animal Park figured the southern white rhinoceros as endangered, asking how the species came to embody the quality and status of endangerment in the midst of a Southern Californian public uncertain of its own survival.