Dissecting the ethics of choreographed encounters with animal death in the zoo: a posthumanist lens on dark pedagogy

Abstract

Choreographed encounters with death in Copenhagen Zoo, such as school and public dissections, emphasize the importance of touch and are underpinned by the moral imperative to understand the nature of life and death. Such encounters are framed by zoo educators as contributing to a deeper environmental awareness. Taking the role of dead animals in the educational activities of Copenhagen Zoo as the focus, this article examines the underpinning ideology of choreographed encounters with animal death through participant observation of school and public dissections and carcass feeding, in addition to semi-structured open interviews with educational staff. Advancing literature on the pedagogy of death and the role of animals in education, this analysis illustrates how anthropocentric conceptualizations of nature as a resource to be exploited, protected, and saved infuse the pedagogy of dissection. Taking the stickiness of these encounters seriously, a posthuman lens reveals the problematic attachments and violent detachments that touching animal flesh in out-of-school contexts produces.

Keywords:

• Affect
• posthumanism
• hidden curriculum
• environmental and sustainability education
• human-animal relations

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to the management, staff, and zookeepers at Copenhagen Zoo who gave me the time and access required to study their work. I would like to bring attention to the many more-than-human others who populate these pages, and hope that readers can use this work to reflect on their own relationship with nature. I would also like to thank the reviewers at EER, whose insightful feedback strengthened this article, and I am grateful for the financial support provided by the ESRC and University of Exeter to pursue this research. Finally, thanks to my family, specifically Michael, for getting me over the line every time. For my recently departed Dad, whose inquiring mind, gentle nature, and ability to put people at ease continues to shape my work as an ethnographer and my way of being in the world.

Ethics statement

The zoo educators, the teachers, and students gave their informed consent to participate. The project was approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of Exeter.

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Data availability statement

The data is not publicly available to protect the privacy of individual participants, whose information has been pseudonymized.

Notes

1 I explore the tension between the authenticity of ‘real nature’ and the artifice of ‘Disney nature’ elsewhere (Mc Loughlin 2022a). However, in drawing on posthumanist scholarship, this work contributes to the destabilizing of fixed narratives on reality as knowable and challenges dualistic positioning of nature in hierarchical opposition to the human.

2 The European Association of Zoos and Aquaria is the membership organisation for zoos and aquaria in Europe and Western Asia and is responsible for coordinating conservation and management policies and codes of conduct.

Additional information

Funding

This research was jointly funded by a Doctoral Studentship awarded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the University of Exeter.