Zoos are a lot like farms—except, of course, in a zoo you can’t pick out an animal you like and kill it and eat it.

Unless, perhaps, the zoo itself is struggling financially and the owner has lost all hope.

Philomena

Why do people view human-animal love as so immoral?

Our cognitive template of morality is dyadic, featuring an agent and a patient, an intentional thinking doer and a suffering vulnerable feeler. Animals are seen as vulnerable feelers and not thinking doers, which means that they seem to suffer while lacking the agency to give informed consent—a key component of sexual relationships.

But it isn’t clear that animals actually suffer or that consent is actually important to animals. Animals never give informed consent, not even to the conspecifics they mate with in the wild, and we don’t imprison two donkeys for having consentless sex with each other. Instead we are likely reacting to the relative imbalance between the minds of humans and those of the animals with whom they become intimate.

This logic suggests that the way to make zoophilia seem less immoral is to have trysts with animals perceived to have high agency and low experience. Sexual relations with dangerous and apparently unfeeling tiger sharks seem more forgivable than with helpless and sensitive miniature donkeys.

Dan Wegner & Kurt Gray, Mind Club

The sign on the wall read:

SAFARIS TO ANY YEAR IN THE PAST
YOU NAME THE ANIMAL
WE TAKE YOU THERE
YOU SHOOT IT

“Does this safari guarantee I come back alive?”

“We guarantee nothing,” said the man behind the desk, “except the dinosaurs, of course. Good luck.”

He entered the Machine. There was a sound like a gigantic bonfire burning all of Time, all the years and all the parchment calendars, all the hours piled high and set aflame. All and everything returning to the fresh death, the seed death, the green death, to the time before the beginning.

The Machine slowed; its scream fell to a murmur. The Machine stopped. The sun stopped in the sky.

He emerged from the Machine and sat in the ancient wilderness. Far birds’ cries blew on a wind, and the smell of tar and an old salt sea, moist grasses, and flowers the color of blood. The jungle was high and the jungle was broad and the jungle was the entire world forever and forever. Sounds like music and sounds like flying tents filled the sky, and those were pterodactyls soaring with cavernous gray wings, gigantic bats of delirium and night fever.

The jungle was full of twitterings, rustlings, murmurs, and sighs. Suddenly it all ceased, as if someone had shut a door. Silence. A sound of thunder. Out of the mist, one hundred yards away, came Tyrannosaurus Rex, a great evil god.

Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory, and steel mesh. From the great breathing cage of its upper body, two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys. And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like daggers. It exhaled. The stink of raw flesh blew down the wilderness.

“Oh fuck, it sees me!” he shrieked.

The beast’s boulderstone eyes leveled with the man. The man saw himself mirrored in the beast. A windstorm from the beast’s mouth engulfed him in the stench of slime and old blood. The Monster roared, teeth glittering with sun.

He fired at the metallic eyelids and the blazing black iris. Like a stone idol, like a mountain avalanche, Tyrannosaurus fell. The body hit, ten tons of cold flesh and stone. The Monster lashed its armored tail, twitched its snake jaws, and lay still. A fount of blood spurted from its throat. The thunder faded.

Upon his return, the room was there as he had left it, but not the same as he had left it. The same man sat behind the same desk. But the same man did not quite sit behind the same desk.

There was a feel. His flesh twitched. His hands twitched. He stood drinking the oddness with the pores of his body. What sort of world it was now, there was no telling.

Somehow, the sign had changed:

SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST
YU NAIM THE ANIMALL
WEE TAEK YU THAIR
YU SHOOT ITT

He fumbled crazily at the thick slime on his boots. He held up a clod of dirt, trembling, “No, it can’t be. Not a little thing like that. No!”

Embedded in the mud, glistening green and gold and black, was a butterfly, very beautiful and very dead.

Ray Bradbury, Sound Of Thunder