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Bombs and Beasts: The Hidden Battle for Zoo Survival

• Michele McAloon • Season 3 • Episode 137

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 "World War Zoos: Humans and Other Animals in the Deadliest Conflict of the Modern Age." University of Chicago Press

To find our more about Michele McAloon: Your host.

https://www.bookclues.com

What happens to zoo animals when war breaks out? It's a question few of us consider, yet the answer reveals profound truths about humanity's moral compass. 

Professor John M. Kinder takes us on a haunting journey through World War II's forgotten captives in "World War Zoos: Humans and Other Animals in the Deadliest Conflict of the Modern Age." From pandas evacuated during the Pearl Harbor bombing to bears kept in Nazi concentration camps, these stories expose the complex relationship between humans and animals during humanity's darkest hours.

The moral questions are unsettling: How do zookeepers justify feeding lions when people are starving? Which animals live and which die when resources grow scarce? The hard decisions made during wartime strip away the educational veneer of zoos, revealing raw calculations about which lives matter most. As Kender explains, "Zoos spend a lot of time creating hierarchies of which animals are more important than others... but the ultimate lesson they send is we care about people more than any animal."

Particularly disturbing is the Nazis' weaponization of Germany's renowned zoological gardens. The "German Zoo" within Berlin's larger facility wasn't just an exhibition but a propaganda machine festooned with swastikas. Even more chilling was the Bear of Buchenwald, kept near concentration camp prisoners as a tool of dehumanization—a daily reminder that in Nazi ideology, camp inmates ranked below animals.

These historical accounts remain urgently relevant today. As climate change threatens ecosystems and conflicts engulf regions with zoos, we must reconsider fundamental questions about animal captivity. Are traditional zoos justified in the 21st century? Is bringing back extinct species through backbreeding ethical when so many living species face extinction?

Join us as we explore this overlooked chapter of history that challenges how we think about zoos, war, conservation, and our responsibility toward other species. Listen now and question your assumptions about our relationship with captive wildlife.

Michele McAloon:

Professor John M Kinder, welcome to the show.

Professor John M Kinder:

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Michele McAloon:

Oh, we're so excited. This is a really interesting book that we're going to talk about today. You guys always hear me say that these books are really interesting, and of course they are, because I pick them. So I only pick what I find truly interesting to read. But this book is a challenging book in that it brings up a lot of questions that I personally have not thought of before and I think many readers have not thought of before. John M Kinder has written a book called World War Zoos: Humans and Other Animals in the Deadliest Conflict of the Modern Age. And who's your publisher, Professor ki nder?

Professor John M Kinder:

It's University of.

Michele McAloon:

Chicago Press. Oh yes, and that's a great publisher. By the way, professor Kinder is a professor of history at Oklahoma State University, where he's director of the American Studies Program. He is the author of Paying With their Bodies, american War and the Problem of the Disabled Veteran, but he's also co-edited Service Denied, marginalized Veterans in Modern American History. And they Are Dead and Yet they Live. Civil War Memory in a Polarized America, which will be out in 2025 and 2026. He's also written a book on alligators and he's currently writing a book about a murder that took place in Mississippi during World War II. And you know what, professor Kinder? Sign me up for that interview because I love a murder mystery. I'm from Alabama and you know what we have to say about Mississippi.

Professor John M Kinder:

So welcome to the show, and it's a really great story and it involves Alabama too, so you'll like it.

Michele McAloon:

That's great. I really look forward to it. But let's talk about your book, and this really is a phenomenal book. It's well-written, it's well-documented and you bring out a lot of things that I think people just don't think about. You open up your book starting with the 30s, but you tell a story behind the pandas at Pearl Harbor. Tell us about that, because that kind of shows how animals are sort of products of war, products of the media, products of social interaction with humans, and not always in the most positive of ways.

Professor John M Kinder:

Yeah, and this is one of those stories that I discovered early on and that really struck me as especially illustrative and telling.

Professor John M Kinder:

So, the Pandas at Pearl Harbor, this was one of the stories that I discovered early in writing this book, and the important thing to remember is that prior to the early 20th century, there weren't pandas in the West, and so they were still remarkable, they were still new, and at the Bronx Zoo, right before the start of World War II, the last remaining panda, named Pandora, died, and this led to a real sense of both outrage but a real desire to replace her, and so the zoo commissioned various folks who were situated in China to capture a panda, bring it back to the zoo, and what happened was they wound up capturing two, and so I tell this somewhat unbelievable story about all it took to kind of bring these pandas from China, which was in the middle of fighting against Japan in World War II, bringing them all the way back, and it turns out they were at sea in the Pacific, heading toward the United States when Pearl Harbor is bombed.

Professor John M Kinder:

So they wind up arriving in Pearl Harbor Basically there are still fires right and they're put on the first civilian vessel that leaves Pearl Harbor and goes to the United States.

Professor John M Kinder:

What was striking about this to me was simply the idea that, amidst all of this chaos, amidst all of this bloodshed, amidst everything else going on, there would still be enough room on this civilian vessel that carried wounded people and sick people and people who were burned from Pearl Harbor. There was still room to put these pandas on and there was still, amidst everything else, there was still this desire and need to bring these pandas back, and I think that really tells you something about just how important zoo animals, or at least certain zoo animals, were. Right. And, in fact, part of what I want to convey is the idea that in times of chaos, in times of social turmoil, basically there are two things that can happen Either people abandon zoo animals or they cling on to them more desperately. Right, there's this need to sort of be around them, and in a weird way, I think the Pandas of Pearl Harbor gives us a glimpse of both.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, it's really an interesting tale and it's interesting that you open this and then you kind of explain why you write this book. And I think that's really interesting because you deal with veterans, you deal with alligators. Really interesting because you deal with veterans, you deal with alligators. Why this book about animals in zoos during wartime and this is still happening today?

Professor John M Kinder:

There are two reasons one kind of intellectual, professional, and the other one personal. So the personal reason is that I've always been fascinated with zoos. When growing up, I always went to the zoo. As I aged, I started seeing things at the zoo that made me a little more uncomfortable. I went to the Berlin Zoo in the late 1990s, and I saw this exhibit showing the deaths of some elephants that were killed in a bombing raid, and what struck me was simply how little it conveyed about what really happened. It was just basically a photograph showing the elephants their legs sticking out of the rubble. There was no sense of what happened, what the zoo was doing, what was going on in Germany at the time, and so I felt a real frustration about that.

Professor John M Kinder:

In my mind, the link between disabled veterans and zoos is not as strange as it might look on the outside. What really interests me is how war leaves its mark on society. Right, we often have these military histories where the last page the war is over. But with looking at disabled veterans, one of the things that people often talk about is that for disabled veterans, the war is never over. Right, the war lives in their bodies. Right, it's forever marked. So in my mind, the disabled veteran's body is a obvious place, a material place where war leaves its mark. But with this book I wanted to choose a not an obvious place, a place that no one would really think about. Now I wanted to kind of say that war leaves its mark in these places that you would never even imagine, that that would slip your mind, you know. In that sense that's my transition, because it's all about kind of thinking about how war shapes our society in expected and unexpected ways.

Michele McAloon:

You really bring out sort of the moral complexity of zoos. To begin with, I don't know how else we do it, how we kind of cage wild animals and we put them in enclosures. They're kind of condemned to living their lives, but they're sort of a source of entertainment and education for us. It is a morally complex question. It really is how do we value our own lives? How do we value the lives of animals? You put some hard questions in there.

Professor John M Kinder:

I mean, zoos are difficult places to study, right, because, on the one hand, if you go to zoos, what you're likely going to encounter are a lot of people who are very serious about animal welfare, people who get up very early in the morning to do all kinds of things to help animals, to feed animals, to clean their cages for often very little money, so they're in some ways putting in the work of caring for animals. They spend a lot of time and a lot of resources on trying to transmit some of those messages about animals to the public. So I certainly acknowledge all of that. There's a lot that is difficult to stomach when it comes to the zoo. Right, for the longest time, zoos have often kind of cloaked themselves in this mantle of education, when really zoos are just about entertainment. Right, they're about taking animals, placing them in captivity, not for their sake not slightly different project but dealing with the rebuilding of the Baghdad Zoo after the invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s. So the zoo was pretty much devastated and there was a lot of outside help coming in to rebuild the zoo. And one thing that someone who's working there at the time said look, baghdad, this is a really difficult climate. These are really difficult circumstances. Why don't we get a bunch of animals from a desert climate, basically animals from the region, that way we could, a demonstrate or teach people about these animals that already surround them and maybe kind of breed a sense of conservation, and B this would make it much more easy to keep these animals alive. And this person was basically told no, right, it's not a real rebuilding unless we put in the conventional ABC animals, charismatic megafauna and so forth. So in that very instant there was this desire to not think about animal welfare, not think about sort of what it's like to even run a zoo. The desire was to satisfy this need of people to watch, and that's what I ultimately come down to. Zoos are about all kinds of things, right, but they're about people more than anything else, right?

Professor John M Kinder:

I say in the book that zoos spend a lot of time kind of creating these hierarchies of which animals are more important than others, which ones sort of we care about more than others. But the ultimate lesson they send is we care about people more than any animal, and you can see it in the architecture, you can see it in the decisions they make about animal care and you can sort of see it in these difficult decisions about whether to remain open or not remain open in these difficult times. And so the zoo is a very complex place. There are a lot of people who are working there for very good reasons, but at the end of the day, I think so much of the zoo is difficult, if not impossible, to justify, right? Particularly if we're thinking about the kind of side of the road zoo, small town zoos.

Professor John M Kinder:

I mean, it's great to think about places like San Diego Zoo and the Berlin Zoo and the London Zoo and Tokyo's Imperial Zoo. But you know, it's important to remember that most zoo animals are living in conditions that are not that different from what they would have been two centuries ago, right? So many of them are still living in small cages, little enrichment, you know, maybe better food. Zoos are always trying to justify themselves, right? This is why we need to stay open, this is why we're so important, and that's another reason why looking at zoos in wartime was so interesting to me, because if this is what zoos are trying to do in peacetime, in wartime, they really had to make an effort to say.

Michele McAloon:

This is why, at a time of rationing, at a time of all kinds of social change, like we need to stay open because and they would use all kinds of different arguments to make that case- but I tell you what was really fascinating was you're writing your chapter on the 30s and kind of the workup to World War II and especially what was really fascinating was going through the think of that. But of course it kind of reflected their greater pathos, Using zoos as kind of a medium or animals as a medium.

Professor John M Kinder:

Germans were animal lovers. You hear the story about Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, and what I tried to do is kind of investigate some of those ideas. And it is true, prior in the 1930s, germany was the center of the zoo world right, it had the world's best zoos at highest concentration of really strong zoos. Zookeepers or zoo leaders were most likely to have advanced degrees, the newest architecture, that sort of thing, and there is this long history that connects German culture to an observation and celebration of nature. There's a lot to work with there. So when the Nazi regime began to take power, obviously they drew upon this right. They incorporated zoos into things like propaganda, into their sort of quasi almost, if not eugenicists, then evolutionary ideas about equating certain animal species to different racial groups and so forth, and they also used zoos for all kinds of propaganda events. And this is one thing that I like to think about and I hope people kind of take away from this book is I want them to look at the zoo differently, because think about what a zoo is.

Professor John M Kinder:

Zoo is a place where it's usually in the city, or at least older zoos were in the city.

Professor John M Kinder:

It has a lot of green space right.

Professor John M Kinder:

It often has a lot of stages, it often has a lot of people who are used to presenting messages to people, and it also has a lot of signs, plaque telling you these natural history messages, and so forth.

Professor John M Kinder:

So it's an ideal site for propaganda, right. It's an ideal site for a political rally, for a recruitment rally. It's an ideal site to where you have this audience who might not think that they are engaging in some kind of political action, but the Germans of the Nazi era were very cognizant of this. One thing that was built at the Berlin Zoo at this time was a German zoo, and it was a special zoo within the zoo that was meant to not just present especially German animals, but it would be filled with swastikas, it would be filled with these kind of propaganda messages and it was all about celebrating this notion of nationalism, right, and Germany wasn't the only zoo to do this, but in Germany there was an especially acute connection or this drive to sort of view the zoo in nationalist terms, and this could involve everything from remaking the zoo and festooning it in various kinds of slogans and propaganda to actually building zoos in concentration camps, which was something that I had never even thought of before I started writing this book.

Professor John M Kinder:

Tell the folks about the Baron Buchenwald concentration camp. One thing that you will see is this strange little display and it looks almost like this miniature artificial mountain and what it was was a cage or an exhibit for bears, because there was a zoo at Buchenwald concentration camp and it was not the only concentration camp to have a zoo. And to get back to this earlier point, the camp commander built the zoo in part for his own entertainment. He loved zoos, he loved kind of walking around zoos, taking his child through the zoo, and it was designed to be a kind of form of entertainment and education. So they were always worried about camp guards and so forth, getting drunk, getting trouble and so forth. So the idea was to if they could teach them this appreciation of nature by exposing them to the zoo, this might be a good way to keep them in line. Part of Nazi ideology was this appreciation of nature. But it also had an explicitly disciplinary purpose for the prisoners, because it's roughly 10 paces away from the open grounds where the camp prisoners would be forced to stand every morning, and so they would be standing and just looking right through the barbed wire at this zoo. The message was to remind them that they are no greater than animals, they are less than animals. It was a tool of dehumanization.

Professor John M Kinder:

And so the Bear of Buchenwald is this remarkable illustrated poem that was produced by one of the camp prisoners in 1946. It's the sort of thing that should be in a museum. So it's in full color and basically tells the story of Betty, which was one of the bears at Buchenwald, and Betty's escape, and so it talks about how they raised Betty and the camp prisoners. They were always trying to work with the animals, in part because if you work with the animals, camp prisoners, they were always trying to work with the animals, in part because if you work with the animals you're likely to get better food right, even leftover food from the animals, and so forth. But Betty goes, escapes right, and so this is obviously this, both this metaphor for their escape, but also they saw Betty's escape as they saw Betty as themselves in some ways, and of course Betty gets captured, shot, brought back to Buchenwald and eaten by the camp guards.

Professor John M Kinder:

So the story of the Baird-Buchenwald, on the one hand, shows this sort of connection between the camp prisoners and these captive animals, and this is I mean talk about sort of difficult topics Like this is a theme that runs throughout, right? So you see this idea of this, the metaphor of the zoo being used to describe concentration camp experiences by people who survived them. So you have this connection between these are two captive beings, but on the other hand, the author talks about how the prisoners were smelling Betty's sizzling flanks over the open fire and are just starving to death. And so they're torn between this desire, this connection to Betty, and this desire to eat Betty. Of course they would right, because they're starving right, and it shows just how kind of complex our relationships are with animals, but also how people try to make their way through these difficult circumstances.

Professor John M Kinder:

And in some ways, that's the story of the zoo during World War II. Right During World War II, there was this desire, this connection to animals, because animals were getting bombed, animals were getting killed, and so there was this real connection to people who also felt that they were vulnerable, this shared sense of vulnerability. On the other hand, there was a real fear of those animals and in some cases people were hungry enough a desire to eat them. That's kind of so. Yeah, the Baron Buchenwald is one of those. When I first saw it, it is one of those moments that really kind of changed the direction of the book, in the sense that whatever happened I knew I wanted to put that in there.

Michele McAloon:

I tell you about capturing humanity. My goodness, that one that's really. It's so morally complex. One thing that you brought out, too, was you just kind of touched upon. It is okay, you've got war coming, everybody's sacrificing, people are reducing calories. How do you feed all these animals, and how do you justify feeding all these animals in a population that is hungry? Also, and also, has there always been this fear that wild animals will get out and eat people, I mean, and does that persist today? I just asked you a bunch of questions, but these are the questions that were firing my mind when I was reading the book.

Professor John M Kinder:

So I'll answer the second question first. So the second question is yes, right, this idea that animals will escape and eat people, that's sort of built into the zoo, right. In fact, if you go to the zoo you will be surrounded by signs that say do not go into the cave. These are wild animals they can attack, and in fact so much of the zoo is kind of designed to build up that sense, right. So the only reason you can get so close is because of these iron bars, right, and that's, if these ever went away, could viciously hunt you, and so this is part of the kind of visceral thrill that zoos try to do. And I'm not saying that zoo animals aren't dangerous. But of course, as someone who has gone to places like the Bronx Zoo before opening hours and you see people in the leopard cages, just kind of with the leopard sitting right next to them while they're washing out the cages, a good deal of this fear is manufactured, but it's manufactured in a way that helps kind of up the entertainment value of the zoo itself. So, yes, there is always that, and of course most zoo animals, if they ever have a chance to escape, don't escape, or if they do escape, they escape within a few blocks, right, they're not hunting down people. So it's that fear is the zoo's own kind of desire to make this more exotic. It's sort of coming home to roost and now they're having to deal with it. But the first question is in many ways more interesting to me, in part because it really touches on zoos today, because there are a lot of hungry people in the world. There's climate crisis, there's concerns about the long-term viability, large sections of the planet, some sections in which that have been breadbaskets for humanity. The question is and this was something that zoos would always face Like, if people were hungry, how can you justify feeding animals? And zoos tried to do as much as possible to push that question to the side. They would do it by doing a lot of things they do every day. So zoos during World War II would grow victory gardens, just like people at home. So all the green space that you see in a zoo, all the pretty flower beds that would be replaced with corn and grain and vegetables and so forth. So the idea is to make them as self-sufficient as possible.

Professor John M Kinder:

The other concern was to try to take the zoo. Diets often depend upon bugs from Mexico and bananas from South America, right? So if you couldn't have those things, how could you try to replace them? And so during World War II, zoos had what were called patriotic diets. In the Great Depression they called them depression diets. So basically substitutes for a lot of zoos.

Professor John M Kinder:

So zoo food. So things like sweet potatoes dipped in honey as maybe a potential replacement for a banana, or cat's meat dipped in cod's liver oil as a replacement for anchovies. And zoo animals weren't buying it, but a good zoo leader would always say no, my animals are always eating it, they love it. Please don't shut us down. And of course, the other solution was to destroy some of the animal stock, and this was not something that zoos took lightly, but it is something that zoos did quite a bit, and they did it out of real public pressure, or even perceived pressure.

Professor John M Kinder:

The arguments that they would make for it there are various kinds of arguments, but at the core, one of the arguments they would often make was that certain animals are worth more dead than alive. That is, we need to kill some animals to feed to others. When I talk about this sort of hierarchy at the zoo something and we all know it, we all know which animals get the big signs. This is often how it would play out. So there might be some antelope that, and the idea of the zoo leader was that, well, the public doesn't really know the difference between this sable antelope and this other kind of antelope, and they all kind of look the same and we have 15 of them, so why don't we kill 10 of them? We'll live with five and we'll use that meat to feed others.

Professor John M Kinder:

Right Now again, zoos are making similar kinds of. They're dealing with similar kinds of dilemmas all the time. But one thing that I think is really useful about studying zoos in wartime is that these questions that are often hidden behind the scenes are brought to the surface right. And of course, there were some zoos that completely shut down and even killed all of their animals and usually making this argument that in a time of rationing, we cannot ration or we cannot justify spending food on these animals and so forth. So this would come out throughout the war years, and this was something that zoos were very cognizant of, and sometimes they felt like they had to make a public display of killing their animals just to show that they were doing their bit, they were willing to sacrifice, that they understood the stakes of this war.

Michele McAloon:

That had to kill the zoo people, though I mean that had to. I mean, if you're invested in an animal, I mean it's like killing your dog or your cat if you're working with an animal in the zoo, right.

Professor John M Kinder:

Oh, and I mean it was terrible right, with an animal in the zoo, right? Oh, and I mean it was terrible right. So there would be instances where animals would be to save bullets, like animals would be starved and so forth, and then the zookeeper who had been with them for 20 years would be sneaking them food or basically breaking down in tears because, on the one hand, they're being asked to do something that runs against everything that they had been taught, everything they'd spent their life on. My editor, kind of warned, said that this is a sad animal book, and sometimes it's hard to get people to read sad animal books.

Professor John M Kinder:

And I think it is a sad animal book, but it's not necessarily sad for the reasons that people think. I think part of the sadness. There's a sadness when we see these moments of cruelty and willingness to sort of destroy animals and to put our lives above them. But there's also a sadness that comes from when we see these moments of empathy, right, when we see these moments of genuine caring, because it's easy for us to project ourselves into that position and say, well, what would I do if I was told that I need to put my cat down or euthanize my dog or stop feeding my goldfish Exactly everything. This was terribly traumatic for a lot of people.

Michele McAloon:

Sure human beings and, of course, a lot of animals.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, human beings have a real connection with animals. We just do. It's part of our community, it's who we are as human beings. I have to ask you a question. We kind of touched on it, I think, in an earlier email. But what has happened to the animals in Ukraine, like in Kharkiv or Mariupol? I lived in the former Soviet Union for a number of years and I saw a lot of those zoos and they would I mean no, I mean horrible conditions, horrible sad conditions, you know, when the Russians were overrunning those cities. I can't believe that. What happened to those animals? Were they able to get the animals out?

Professor John M Kinder:

or do you know. A number of them were right. So, and especially within the first few weeks, there were a number of high-profile stories about zoos from people going into cities, basically under siege, with vans, sometimes without any kind of anesthesia or just putting animals in the back of the van, animals in a truck, right animals in a cage and getting them through this war zone and taking them to places in Poland and Romania and others. There were also plenty of stories and I cannot confirm this, but a lot of the reporting seems incredibly solid to me, which is that of zoos being looted, of animals being taken.

Professor John M Kinder:

And that is something that happened. That happens in every war, right? That certainly happens all throughout World War II, you know, zoos in occupied countries would be looted and some animals would be eaten, others animals would be taken back to places like Germany and put in its zoos, and so forth. So I'm certain that that happened. I imagine that there are plenty of animals that are still there, that are still suffering, and so forth. There was this moment early on where there were a number of animals evacuated from the war zone and there was a great deal of public sympathy and so forth.

Professor John M Kinder:

The question always is is that what happens now? Right, say, there's a ceasefire? Do they go back? And is there any lesson to be learned from this? Is the lesson that war is this kind of state of exception, right, this little momentary glitch between normal life and normal life, and so bad things can happen at the zoo. But as soon as things are back to normal, we're back in business.

Professor John M Kinder:

And so it was the idea that after a ceasefire, these animals are sent back there, knowing full well that at any moment, at any time. Or do we take a bigger message from this, which is a kind of a reflection about what are we doing with zoos in the first place, right? What is the purpose of having these zoo animals here? What is the purpose of having them in this kind of captivity? Is the goal to sort of get these zoos back to where they were, or is it to take this bigger? To grapple with this bigger question about does this make sense in the long run, right? Does the zoo make sense in the 21st century in the way that people thought it made sense in the 19th?

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, it seems like things. I mean I hate to say it, but it seems like things like AI and our graphics are so good. I know people want to be next to a tiger, but I mean this is the moral question. I've got one other question. This may be offbeat for you, but OK, the birth of Romulus and Remus, the dire wolves. Where do you think the zoos are going to go with that as they try this backbreeding? Because the Nazis tried to backbreed too right. To me that was a little bit very morally questionable on so many different levels. But then when reading about your book about the Zeus, that really wow, that really throws in a whole different twist there.

Professor John M Kinder:

Yeah, I mean I should say that I have not read all of the research or all the. I'm just sort of following this sort of as an outsider, but I too find it problematic. And I find it problematic on a couple of reasons, on a couple of levels. So one as you noted that the Nazis did indeed do this right Lutz Heck, who was the head of the Berlin Zoo, and his brother. They tried to backbreed a number of species, including these aurochs, these sort of giant kind of cattle that went extinct. Powerful sort of Germany. They tied it into these broader kind of ideas about race and evolution and so forth. Now today, some of those things are still around. Zoo people think that they're basically on the level of ligers. These kind of you're not real thing. But this idea that somehow we can use this technology to bring these extinct animals back to life, right, it sounds so promising. The problem, of course, and what I think a lot of conservationists and even zoo people would say, is that A why don't we focus on the animals that we have right?

Professor John M Kinder:

Right yeah, sure, because, after all, the idea is to focus on conservation and ecology and thinking about these broad systems that allow not just animals but all of us to live and survive and flourish on Earth, right, so you can see a version of this that looks like nature is a wasteland. You can see a version of this that looks like nature is a wasteland, but we've been able to resurrect these animals that now can't go live in nature. They're just there in zoos and they're just there for us to look at, and so forth. So I think they're problematic. And also, I think they're problematic because, in many ways, they run against the very idea of the main message of zoos. As you said, why do we have zoos? Zoos will tell you that the reason they exist is not because they give us the most information about animals. They certainly don't, right, not that we can learn the most about animals. No, you can learn the most animals about animals with a video camera, right, and that allows you to watch them and so forth. You can read about them, but there's something about this kind of authentic, close connection that you can only get by being face-to-face with them, right, and there's this sense of authenticity. Now, that's problematic for all kinds of reasons. But if the idea is that now we're just going to create these animals from using all of these kind of technological techniques and so forth, then like what are these right? Right? Yeah, you certainly can't kind of claim this authentic sense of they're a fiction, they're something else.

Professor John M Kinder:

If there were dire wolves in my town, would I go and see them? Probably? Yes, you would. I mean, I would sort of want to look at seeing them, but what I would see would probably be a couple of animals that look sort of like wolves, and then what I would need is this whole story around them to make them interesting, and I think that's part of the problem. I think that just as interesting would be two gray wolves. They look kind of the same and these ones are still alive and these ones are still kind of out in nature and these ones are still fighting for territory and these are ones really play an ecological role versus these others. They're a curiosity, but I don't think there's anything else, and I worry that if we get too excited about kind of this, this kind of artificial animal, we will lose track of the real ones.

Michele McAloon:

Of what we're really doing. Yeah, I care about. The Germans are up in arms because they brought the wolves back. I mean, they were wolves that were on the verge of extinction, but they brought them back. I don't know if it's a gray wolf or whatever. And guess what? A man and wolves don't live well together. That's where we get werewolves.

Michele McAloon:

We have a complex relationship with animals we really do and how we want to see them and how we want to interact with them. We want to interact with them on our own terms, not on their terms, and I mean that's, I think, quintessentially what a zoo is about.

Professor John M Kinder:

That's exactly what a zoo is. It's on our terms and so our terms could literally mean the easiest way to look at a bear is to put a bear in a concrete pit and we walk up and look down on it. Seeing a bear in the wild is hard right. I've seen one in my life and that was from a hundred yards away and I've gone out sort of looking for them and I know people it depends on where you live and so forth. But no, I mean a lot of engaging with these animals is difficult, but I can.

Professor John M Kinder:

I mean anyone who's done anything remotely connected with conservation or just likes being outside knows that it's one thing to see a lizard in a zoo right that's presented. It's another thing, a completely different, far more thrilling thing, to see a lizard on a rock, knowing that if you walk by five minutes later that lizard wasn't there and it's not being presented to you and it's not. You're just there with it and I don't want to romanticize that. But I also realize that, yeah, I mean zoos are exactly kind of seeing nature, seeing animals on our own terms, and when during World War II, some of those terms changed and zoos, animals, paid the price, Professor Kendrick, this is a amazing book.

Michele McAloon:

This is an amazing book. It really is, and it's just this conversation that we've had shows just kind of the complexity of some of the issues that you bring up, and so I encourage people to go read this book. I think it would be a great book club read, actually to talk about zoos and experience with zoos. I know I'm going to send it to some of my relatives who are zoo lovers and they might want to think about zoos differently To my reading audience out there. I do hope you go get this book. Where can we find out more about you, professor Kinder, and your work?

Professor John M Kinder:

Well, you can just look online. I am a professor at Oklahoma State University, so if you just type in my name, john M Kinder, the first thing that will come up is the what? Now they replaced our personal websites with these experts directory, and it does the same thing. It shows research things. I'm working on the things that interest me, so you can find all of that there, right? So, but yeah, I'm trying to stay busy.

Michele McAloon:

Well, very good. Well, I hope to have you back to talk about your Mississippi murder.

Professor John M Kinder:

Oh I, I, I am so excited about this one. It's completely different from anything I've ever done.

Michele McAloon:

When will that book be out?

Professor John M Kinder:

Oh, it'll be a few years, I'm okay.

Michele McAloon:

And the alligator book. Where can we find the alligator book?

Professor John M Kinder:

Well, the alligator book is technically not out either, so I'm still I'm in the middle of writing the alligator book and the murder book, but the alligator book is due next summer, so that one will probably be 2027.

Michele McAloon:

I'm a girl from Alabama. I love myself a gator.

Professor John M Kinder:

Alligators are easy to see.

Michele McAloon:

Yeah, believe me, and where I'm from, south Alabama, they're very easy to see. You just look at any golf course golfers, alligators. So, professor Kinder, thank you very much for taking time out of your busy schedule. Oh, it was great, and I really appreciate your asking me.