Streaming the Animal: Privacy and Visibility in the San Diego Zoo

By Pauw Vos

During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 many zoos were urged to close their doors in keeping with the mandates issued by their respective governments. In response to this a large number of zoos moved their activities to the virtual space of the Internet. With the help of live webcam feeds and interactive live streams on social media platforms, zoological gardens all across the world tried to bring the feeling and sensation of the zoo directly into our living room. Tags such as ‘#BringTheZooToYou’ and ‘#ClosedButStillCaring’ show the importance of the human visitor to the animal zoo and reveal it to be its main point of interest. These digital extensions of the zoo further show the capitalist logic underlying of the zoo and how a “key aspect of the ZooCam [webcam] as the latest step in the technological modernization of the zoo experience is that it redoubles the zoo’s promise of proximity” (Burke 69).

The move from an offline zoo to an online zoo, furthermore, creates a wholly different way of looking at animals and also places us as viewers in a different position. John Berger famously wrote that a visit to the zoo “cannot but disappoint … At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on” (28). Despite allowing for round the clock viewing, the advent of the digital zoo seems to make even this flicker an impossibility. The zoo animal, on the other hand, becomes unconditionally visible for the viewing pleasure of those people stuck at home. As Andrew Burke states “[t]he streaming live feed, in this comparison, is the zoological analogue to CCTV” (71). The denial of another species’ privacy is problematic because it “has to do with the recognition of another’s separate existence at the moment of its impending infringement” (Pick 109). Anat Pick explains how the act of not-seeing consequently complicates the desire to see and how “technological solutions to the problem of ‘capturing’ animals confirm animal privacy as a form of resistance”. Whilst Pick mainly focuses on animal life that is tracked outside of zoos, I think this notion of privacy as resistance might still offer a way to reflect upon the positionality of the stay-at-home zoo-visitor. A further way to reflect upon the position of the viewer is through Lori Gruen’s notion of dignity as a relational concept. This view envisions dignity not as focusing “on the worth of individual rational agents making autonomous choices” but rather proposes a conceptualization that ‘brings into focus both the being who is dignified and the individual or community who value the dignified in the right ways” (234). Looking critically at the relation in which (in)dignity comes to be, provokes us as viewers to exercise our moral agency. Acknowledging the dignity of the captured animal will most likely lead to a better well-being for that animal, but the impact on the side of the valuer should not be underestimated. Gruen explains that “being perceptive about dignity-enhancing or dignity-diminishing activities or conditions is a central part of our ethical capacity to treat others as they should be treated” (240).

As a way of investigating the digital zoo I will write a multispecies ethnography that consists of a digital ‘walk’ through the San Diego Zoo. This zoo has a total of eleven live streams that go on night and day and cover the exhibits of several different species, ranging from the ‘Polar Cam’ to the ‘Burrowing Owl Cam’. To my knowledge, this is the largest number of live streams of any zoo. The practice of live streaming can be traced back to the year 1991, when researchers in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Cambridge first started streaming live images of a coffee machine on their local network. This was done in order to keep an eye on the progress of their drip coffee. The first human to be continually live streamed was Jennifer Ringley, who set up a webcam in her university dorm room which uploaded a new picture every fifteen minutes. This ‘Jennicam,’ as it soon became known, anticipated and influenced the reality television of the early 2000’s, for instance Big Brother. The Jennicam’s appeal mainly came from the idea that it offered immediate access to an unmediated and live experience in which anything might happen (Burke 68). A similar attraction seems to be at work in the live streams that focus on nonhuman animals, be it in zoos or in the wild. Starting in 1998 with AfriCam, animals have increasingly become the focal point of many live streaming services. Many of these sites are founded by conservation foundations or individuals who believe in similar causes (Kamphof 84). The popular Dutch website Beleef de Lente, for instance, which has been going since 2007, becomes more popular every year. It shows a selection of nestcams which viewers can access at all time. During the first two months of the COVID-19 lockdown it was estimated that more than a million people had watched the lives and deaths of the chicks and their avian parents (Vroege Vogels). Likewise, zoos were quick to capitalize on the technological possibilities that came with the rise of the Internet. Burke explains, however, that “technological advances may have made ZooCams possible, but it was the desire to market the zoo as a modern attraction that lies behind their emergence and proliferation” (68). An article published by the New York Times in 2000 already reflects upon the (economic) impact of the Internet on zoos. The concern that live streaming might endanger visitor attendance is quickly brushed aside by the senior vice president and general director of the Wildlife Conservation Society. He explains that “‘[t]here’s nothing like seeing a tiger up close and in person … The ambience of a zoo is more than an image on a wall’” (Martin). This remark seems to emphasize the importance of the animals to the zoo. The actual, embodied animal is what ultimately matters to the zoo visitor. The expansion of the zoo into the digital environment, however, also show us that the ideology of the zoo remains firmly informed by and entangled with the logic of capitalism.

Informed by questions on animal visibility, privacy and dignity I intend to visit the different San Diego Zoo streams and reflect upon them through a politicized framework, as described by Kathryn A. Gillespie. She understands this “to be one that centers an attention to the way power and privilege operate in relational encounters (relationships themselves, ways of positioning oneself in relation to others, and the spaces and places where structures of power are in friction with lives and bodies)” (18). I understand that the mediation of the viewing-process does not seem to allow for a direct relation to and with the animals. However, technology plays an increasingly important role in many human-animal relationships. Ike Kamphof, following Donna Haraway, explains, for instance, that “webcams appear as intimate extensions of the human eye and, despite an obvious asymmetry, of the physical presence of both human and other animals involved in the viewing” (85). The digital zoo is an environment that shapes the lives of both the watcher and the watched, human and nonhuman, in unexpected ways. A multispecies ethnography of this new habitat allows me to centre “on how a multitude of organisms’ livelihoods shape and are shaped by political, economic, and cultural forces” (Kirksey and Helmreich 545). By looking at and through the webcams I will attempt to reflect upon the position of the viewer in this new digital zoo. This will hopefully allow me to examine and think through animal privacy in the zoo and how its digitization changes the way we interact with and perceive the zoo animal.

As I start my virtual visit to the Live Cams of the San Diego Zoo I am immediately struck by the discrepancy between the different environments. My computer screen is placed in front of a window that looks out over a street lined with young oak trees. I have just chosen to look at the Penguin Cam, but as I click my way to the live feed I see a flight of house sparrows flit in and out of sight of my window. In the time it takes my computer to load the webcam, they have disappeared from sight and all that is left is their distinctive chittering. The screen loads and the first thing that I notice is a text in the upper-left corner of the feed that reads, in bold letters, “presented by Alaska Airlines”. On the opposite side of this advertisement sits a transparent rectangle with an arrow in it. I click it, and the imperative ‘share’ appears. Underneath the text are five different technological ways of doing so, from Facebook to Pinterest. I close the menu and look at the penguins. The sounds made by the sparrows have been replaced by the bickering of a pair of jackdaws that are building a nest in the nearby vicinity. The Penguin Cam does not have sound. It is purely visual and shows me a small patch of water, leading into a concrete ramp that ends in some pebbles. On these pebbles lie four penguins. They seem to be resting and have their eyes closed. I scroll down, past the option to subscribe to the San Diego Zoo newsletter, and read that I am “watching a live stream of African penguins at the big, new Dan & Vi McKinney Penguin Habitat in Conrad Prebys Africa Rocks”. Both Dan and Violet McKinney and Conrad Prebys were philanthropists from the San Diego area and donated generously to the zoo. As I look closer at the penguins I notice that they all have something around their flippers. Colour-coded bracelets on the left and a name tag on the right. The feeling of control that this framed video, in combination with the text and name tags, conveys is strangely unsettling. David Spurr puts this feeling into words when he talks about the colonial ‘ideology of the gaze’: “[t]he gaze is never innocent or pure … [it] is always in some sense colonizing the landscape, mastering and portioning, fixing zones and poles, arranging and deepening the scene as the object of desire” (27). G. A. Bradshaw, Barbara Smuts, and Debra L. Durham likewise explain that “[v]isual targeting and linguistic packaging render subjects into silent, disempowered objects robbed of agency and autonomy” (138). Similar to the actual zoo and its historical entanglement with colonial conquest, the webpage and the webcam create a technical environment that works based on a “presumed right to visual possession” (138). Every aspect of the penguins’ lives seems to be created with optimal visibility in mind, and to financially support the zoo at large.

Fig. 1 The Penguin Cam as it is presented in the web-browser. San Diego Zoo. San Diego, California.

As I continue looking at the dozing penguins, I feel my attention drifting off and, not unlike at a real zoo, I decide to continue to the next webcam. Clicking the return button in my browser, I am reminded of Kamphof’s reflection on the act of browsing through animal-webcams: “[i]n browsing, the emphasis is on user pleasure and power of access. Webcam technology appears as a means of dominating nature by abnegating material distance and other hindrances” (90-91). With two clicks I’m at the elephant enclosure, whilst remaining firmly seated in my chair. A text similar to the one at the Penguin Cam informs me that this stream is presented by Planet Zoo, a digital game in which players need to successfully operate a virtual zoo. Just outside the frame of the stream is an advertisement showing a little girl holding a plush elephant. It reads: “Official Safari Park Elephant Gear – Shop Now”. Looking up from my computer screen I see a solitary bee bobbing up and down against the window. After several attempts to gain purchase on the glass, it falls away from my view. As I look back, several large, hulking elephants slowly shuffle into the webcam viewer. They seem to bear little resemblance to the cute fluffy elephant in the girl’s embrace. However, as Burke explains “[z]oos attempt to capitalize on cute because, in the era of neoliberalism, cute is a commodifiable attribute that might determine whether a zoo thrives, survives, suffers, or perishes” (78). The mediation of the zoo allows for the advertisement to be placed directly next to a wide shot of the elephant enclosure. With the extended closure due to the Corona virus, the San Diego Zoo seems to make eager use of the economic advantage provided by cuteness. In smaller letters on the side the advertisement reads “Your purchase supports the wildlife in our care”.

As the last elephant lumbers off-screen, the webcam suddenly moves. With jolting movements it follows the elephants while they roam to a different part of their enclosure. As the group huddles together, the camera even zooms in a little. The Elephant Cam is placed up high and this, combined with the active following and zooming of a supposed webcam-operator, heightens the feeling of voyeurism. The open view and unmitigated access to the elephants emphasise the idea that these elephants are only there for my viewing pleasure. It is visual exploitation taken to its critical endpoint. Kamphof explains that the features of the webcam “influence the feelings evoked by a view in the way they situate the viewer towards the viewed and in the degree of objectification they allow” (93).

Fig 2. The Elephant Cam. San Diego Zoo. San Diego, California.

I try to envision how Pick’s idea of “not-seeing” might be applied to this situation. She uses it to connote “the mundane, civic notion of animal privacy that denies human eyes and their technological proxies unlimited access” (109). The possibility of not-seeing the animals allows me to acknowledge that they have their own existence, “not simply as a matter of rights, but in their proximity to and entanglement with humans” (109). In the digital zoo, however, this seems to be an impossibility. Perhaps even more so than in the physical zoo. I can, of course, close my web browser but this does not shut off the camera following the elephants. Not to mention the thousands of people who are watching the stream along with me. The San Diego Zoo Twitter account shows that the webcams are one of the main ways in which they try to keep their audience engaged in these COVID-19 times. Their pinned Tweet reads

The text is followed by a link to the webcam page on the San Diego Zoo website. The zoo itself has an economic and social incentive to keep the live webcams going; to keep people watching and entertained and to provide this in a manner that seems unmediated and current.

Somewhat disheartened I press the return button and scroll through the different Cam shows that are displayed. Every live feed has a picture of its own photogenic animal to show me what I might see once I click it. A diving polar bear with beautiful white fur, an orangutan holding an orange toy that looks vaguely human, a black condor with a huge red tag on its wing that reads ‘221’. I eventually decide to visit the ‘Outback’ and go look at the koalas. The photo shows a baby koala holding on tightly to its mother’s back. This time I am not greeted with advertisements and sponsor-messages. Instead I see the back of a koala as it sits comfortably and half hidden in the nook of a metal construction. From its position it mainly looks like a hairy, grey, amorphous mass. Whilst the koala is still clearly visible and in the centre of the screen, watching it does convey a different feeling than watching the elephants. The pixelated eucalyptus leaves that surround his body move erratically in an unheard breeze. Outside my window a wind that I can hear rustles the branches of the oaks. In her work on media and touch Laura U. Marks talks about “haptic visuality” (2). She contrasts this term to optical visuality and the mastery that is usually associated with visual observation. Whereas “optical images address a viewer who is distant, distinct, and disembodied,” to look haptically invites “the viewer to dissolve his or her subjectivity in the close and bodily contact with the image” (13). Marks explains that haptic visuality “draws from other forms of sense experience, primarily touch and kinesthetics” (2). According to Kamphof it is exactly webcams that can enable haptic viewing “[w]ith their low quality, grainy imagery and, in many situations, lack of clear frame or even focus” (94). As I opened the Koala Cam webpage I noticed myself leaning closer to the screen, physically moving my body, in order to sort out the confusion over what I was seeing. Rather than seeing the koala as an object on the other side of the webcam, I was temporarily caught up in the grey fur, pixelated leaves and unidentifiable shape of the koala. My eyes grazed the computer screen and, for a moment, “viewing subject and viewed object become entwined on the surface of the visual material” (94). Pulling back from the display, however, my eyes caught the line “GET THE NEWSLETTER – Monthly news about animals, events, and more!”. I became untangled from the screen and realised, once again, that I was viewing a captive animal with nowhere else to go. Kamphof’s discussion of webcams and haptic viewing also mainly centres on wildlife cams placed near watering holes or in dens. The webcam in the panda enclosure hardly has “low quality, grainy imagery” and the koala is clearly framed within the viewing screen. Furthermore, I am already aware that I will be watching a koala in captivity, whereas wildlife cams still carry with them the possibility of not-seeing. I know what to look for. The koala, despite my momentary feeling of closeness, is still presented as performing the role of zoo animal. This is only further emphasized by the newsletter and its urgent plea. Animals, events and more are all placed side by side for the spectacle of the human viewer.

Fig 3. The furry, grey and amorphous body of the koala. San Diego Zoo. San Diego, California.

What strikes me every time I open a new Cam is the one-sidedness and absurdity of the whole endeavour. I am sitting in my room, isolated, looking at a live feed of a webcam in the San Diego Zoo that follows a captive animal wherever it goes. Berger already stated in 1977 that “[i]n principle, each cage is a frame round the animal inside it. Visitors visit the zoo to look at the animal. They proceed from cage to cage, not unlike visitors in an art gallery who stop in front of one painting, and then move on to the next or the one after next” (23). These different webcams seem to be a logical continuation of our ever-increasing online presence combined with the ideology of the zoo. Unfortunately, we still almost never stop to ask where this leaves the animal. In an article on wildlife documentaries and animal privacy Brett Mills reflects that, whilst we are usually concerned about not disturbing the animals we film, the question of whether or not it is ethically appropriate to do so is never raised. According to Mills the assumptions underpinning the filming of animals work from a belief “that animals have no right to privacy, and therefore the camera crew have no need to determine whether those animals assent to being filmed” (196). It seems to me that the same rhetoric applies to the placement of webcams in the compounds of zoo animals. The act of looking at an animal “and to decide that humans have a right to look at animals because animals don’t have a right to privacy – is an act of empowerment, reinforcing the moral hierarchy which legitimizes the act in the first place” (199). Whilst never formulated as such, the right to privacy is constructed in such a way as to be applicable only to humans. It is therefore also something that is used to separate the human from the animal. The idea of a clearly delineated human private and public sphere, however, is itself already problematized when looked at in relation to the Internet and corporate capitalism. The moment I entered the website of the San Diego Zoo, for instance, my every click became monitored. Even though I am sitting in the privacy of my own room and browsing on my own computer, data about my digital presence is continually being gathered through the use of cookies and other programmes. The San Diego Zoo Privacy Policy even states that “[a]ny such voluntarily provided information, if applicable, may be used by SDZ [San Diego Zoo] Global for editorial, marketing, or promotional purposes”. Similar to the camera that followed and captured the lumbering elephants, cookies record and remember my digital traces. Whereas the distinction is thus shown to be less clear-cut than it is purported to be, live streams still base part of their validity on this human-animal separation. Animal activities, such as burrowing or nesting, “which might equate with human notions of the private are treated in a manner which suggests the public/private distinction does not hold” (Mills 198).^[1] The webcam only furthers the permanent visibility of the zoo and emphasizes the human-animal dichotomy through the collapse of the private and the public on the side of the animal.

Additionally, the effect of the inescapable human gaze can be seen in the detrimental effect it has on the dignity of the animal. As Gruen explains “[p]art of the value of privacy is that, outside of the sight and judgment of others, we can experiment in living” (Captivity 242). Gruen does not mean to imply that animals engage in the same activities of self-construction that humans perform when alone. Permanent visual control can, however, influence the way in which an animal behaves. Captive animals are often “forced to stop doing the things that make them indecent according to human norms and made to do things that they don’t ordinarily do because humans want them to” (242-43). Gruen states that this undermines the “wild dignity” (236) of the animal. We project our needs and pleasures onto them and prevent the animals from controlling their own lives. In other words, by taking away a creature’s wild dignity we fail to recognize that the life of the other is worth living outside of our gaze. In respecting an animal’s wild dignity I acknowledge it as another living being that shares the world with me. This, furthermore, shows an important aspect concerning dignity, namely that “[w]hether or not an animal herself cares about her dignity is not the point” (237). It is about exercising your moral agency as a fellow living animal. Perhaps this is also part of the uneasy feeling I get while watching these zoo webcams. The website with its too bright colours, the hyperbolic emphasis on enjoyment and fun, an advertisement depicting a rhino and the text “Save the Chubby Unicorns”. All these aspects work together to create a technological environment which does not respect the animal the zoo purports to represent in any way, shape or form.

Whereas the online zoo is mainly an extension of the physical zoo, everything that does occur there seems much more sharply delineated. Out of the eleven webcams, five are sponsored by brands ranging from the soft drink Coca-Cola to the 2D video-game Ori and the Will of the Wisps. The polar bear I am currently watching is “presented by Coca-Cola”. Coca-Cola has a long history of using anthropomorphized polar bears in their commercials. Its first print ad ever, in 1922, depicted a cheerful polar bear mascot pouring the fizzy drink into the mouth of a thirsty sun. In line with this ad, the Polar Bear Cam and the proclamation that it is “presented by Coca-Cola” almost gives the impression that the billion-dollar company has in some way created this polar bear. The polar bear becomes an extension of the brand that is Coca-Cola and loses its wild dignity in the process.

Fig 4. The Polar Bear Cam that is presented by Coca-Cola. San Diego Zoo. San Diego, California.

The indignity I sense also stems from the idea that most people who come to watch these streams do so only as a form of entertainment. They want to be distracted from the virus-induced reality that surrounds us at the moment. This attitude seems to preclude any possibility of seeing the animal as having dignity. Looking at the sleeping polar bear, I hear a wood pigeon cooing outside. Despite having a volume bar, none of the webcams afford the zoo animals an acoustic presence. They are reduced solely to visual projections, without sound or smell. In comparison to the house sparrows, the jackdaws, the solitary bee and the wood pigeon I saw outside my window, the penguins, elephants and the koala are doubly confined. Once physically and once virtually. Bradshaw, Smuts and Durham fortunately gesture towards a way in which looking at the nonhuman animal might be possible in an ethical and relational manner. They ascertain that “[t]he privilege of seeing and watching one and another is attainable only through mutual consent and sustained time together, getting to know each other for the purpose of living well together” (147). In order to achieve this “mutual viewing” (Linden qtd. in Bradshaw, Smuts and Durham 147) we need to relinquish the asymmetrical way of watching that the zoo and its webcams encourages.

The worldwide lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, however, might also help in destabilizing this asymmetry. Whereas webcams foreground the virtual and the visual in our relationship to zoo animals, our corporeal human bodies are currently similarly incarcerated. Suddenly we ourselves are made acutely aware of how our every move and interaction can be monitored. The neurotic pacing of the tiger finds its double in the ten paces I can make from my desk to the kitchen, a move I repeat several times each day. The animals captured on stream become more than just visual objects and turn into strange companions with which I share more than I would like to admit. Similarly I can imagine that, whilst visitors might initially come to the website purely for entertainment, over time they might begin to feel a connection to the animals that appear on their screen. Kamphoff, for instance, also looks at wildlife webcams as potentially affective spaces. She explains how the daily activities of the human viewer become entangled and interspersed with affect for the animals they are watching. In doing so “[w]ebcams allow for relations of co-presence” (“Webcams” 264). Read in this way, the webcam could provide at least one side with the possibility of “getting to know” which is proposed by Bradshaw, Smuts and Durham. Despite this, however, live streaming in the zoo still remains a largely anthropocentric activity in which the animal has little agency. If zoos were to allow ‘not-seeing’ to enter the relationship we have with nonhuman animals we could perhaps begin to see them as worthy of respect. We can feel their limits and respect their privacy. With all this in mind, I take one last look at the brownish polar bear and close the browser.

Notes

^[1] Whilst the notions of the public and the private might in themselves be human cultural constructs, animals can still be seen as needing solitude and not wanting to be seen. Furthermore, activities that are inherently private in the human sphere, such as mating, birthing, and dying, are widely celebrated and shared on social media platforms when filmed with (zoo) animals. Those are exactly the kind of activities we want to see.

Works Cited

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“Beleef de Lente 2020 breekt alle records.” Vroege Vogels. BNNVara, 1 May 2020. https://www.bnnvara.nl/vroegevogels/artikelen/beleef-de-lente-2020-breekt-alle-records

Bradshaw, G. A., Barbara Smuts, and Debra L. Durham. “Open Door Policy: Humanity’s Relinquishment of “Right to Sight” and the Emergence of Feral Culture”. Ed. Ralph R. Acampora. Metamorphoses of the Zoo: Animal Encounter after Noah. Lexington Books, 2010.

Burke, Andrew. “ZooTube: Streaming Animal Life.” The Zoo and Screen Media. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2016. 65-83.

Gillespie, Kathryn A. “For a Politicized Multispecies Ethnography.” Politics and Animals 5 (2019): 17-32.

Gruen, L. ‘Dignity, Captivity, and an Ethics of Sight.’ The Ethics of Captivity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014: 231-248.

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—. “Webcams to Save Nature: Online Space as Affective and Eethical Space.” Foundations of Science 16.2-3 (2011): 259-274.

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Marks, Laura U.. Touch : Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Martin, Douglas. “The Net Is Turning Into a Total Zoo.” The New York Times. The New York Times Comp., 25 Oct. 2000. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/25/business/entertainment-the-net-is-turning-into-a-total-zoo.html

Mills, Brett. “Television Wildlife Documentaries and Animals’ Right to Privacy.” Continuum 24.2 (2010): 193-202.

Pick, Anat. “Why Not Look at Animals?” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies 4.1 (2015): 107-125.

Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. London: Duke University Press, 1993.

@sandiegozoo. “Yes we cam! We got you covered in these crazy times. While we’re closed to the public, you can still get your stress-reducing animal fix via our live cams. Watch penguins, baboons, koalas, giraffes, elephants and more ? hhttp://sdzoo.com/AnimalCams.” Twitter, 17 Mar. 2020, 1:44 a.m., https://twitter.com/sandiegozoo/status/1239714181378535426?s=20.