The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Study of the Urban Animal

by Desmond Morris

Book Overview

How does city life change the way we act? What accounts for the increasing prevalence of violence and anxiety in our world? In this new edition of his controversial 1969 bestseller, The Human Zoo, renowned zoologist Desmond Morris argues that many of the social instabilities we face are largely a product of the artificial, impersonal confines of our urban surroundings. Indeed, our behavior often startlingly resembles that of captive animals, and our...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1568361041
• ISBN13: 9781568361048
• Release Date: March 1996
• Publisher: Kodansha
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.7" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Interesting, insightful and novel

This book is completely absorbing. It begins, where else, but at the beginings of human civilization itself at the site of the first human cities. The journey that Morris brings us on takes us from these humble beginnings to our modern day lives through his shocking and controversial thesis that human beings do not behave like any animal in the wild - but that there are striking similarities between human behaviour and that of captive animals kept in inhumanely-small enclosures. He looks at human behaviour as a quest for status and a desire to fill the time from cradle to grave in a manner not required of animals that have to work and hunt for food, but that is seen frequently in animals held complacent by captivity.

The Adventure Continues

The advent of farming ushered into society a food surplus which brought intertribal trade, which begat towns and the urbanization of the super-tribe, and for the first time each individual no longer knew personally each member of his community. Shifting from a personal to an impersonal society has caused the human animal its greatest agonies for the past several thousand years. As a species we are not biologically equipped to cope with a mass of strangers masquerading as members of our tribe. As a result of the artificiality of the inflation of human social life to the super-tribe level, it became necessary to introduce more elaborate forms of controls to hold the bulging communities together. And this book is the study of our natural biological tendencies butting up against our unnatural social controls. It is a thoroughly fascinating look at our species as it struggles to adapt to the urban sprawl of the modern age. We are an incredibly adaptive animal, but there is no question we are experiencing growing pains as we adapt to an environment for which our genetic evolution has not prepared us. If you have read and enjoyed THE NAKED APE as every person should, then pick up HUMAN ZOO and also INTIMATE BEHAVIOR to complete the five-star Desmond Morris trilogy on human behavior.

A Zoologist examining human "normal" behaviour

We are so embedded in our modern cities and modern way of life (digital communications, home deliveries, grocery stores...) that almost nobody stops to think if we behave as "normal" homo sapiens. Well, here is Dr. Morris telling us we don't. Yeah, every now and then we hear about someone saying we are living in sin, the end of the world is near, anarchy rules and stuff like that, this book has nothing to do with that (and I'm not criticizing any ideology, just demarcating an important diference). This book contains serious opinions of a highly educated scholar whose specialty has trained him to look at details we normally don't pay attention to, and Dr. Morris makes interesting correlations between behaviour manifested in animals (specially apes) in captivity and with humans in big cities. It is always refreshing to read original opinions based on serious studies by intelligent individuals with different mental models, highly recommended reading.

"Well, let's bungle in the . . . zoo?"

Like Desmond Morris's _The Naked Ape_, this book is an old friend of mine. The second volume in his well-known trilogy (the third is _Intimate Behavior_), this one makes a compelling case that modern cities are less like "jungles" and more like zoos.Other animals, Morris says, don't behave in the wild the way humans do in cities. But the sort of erratic violence and heightened self-stimulation in which we find modern humans engaging _does_ have a counterpart in the rest of the animal world: animals do act that way . . . in zoos.Essentially, Morris's claim is that many millions of years of evolution have equipped us for life in small communities in which everybody knows everybody else and there's enough room for us to move around without klonking into each other all the time. We are not, in short, adapted to the modern metropolis, and that's why "city folk" are so danged weird. And our misattribution of our maladaptive behavior actually gives the jungle an undeserved bad name.So what's a naked ape to do? I don't know that the intervening years since this book was first published have generated a whole lot of solutions. I guess that's, um, life in the big city.But as with so many problems, just being aware of the problem is at least half the solution. As with Morris's other books (especially _The Naked Ape_), it's profoundly helpful to step back and see ourselves as one biological species among others (whether or not that's _all_ we are).Okay, maybe that's not all we are; maybe the fact that we _can_ thus step back from ourselves is the single most important fact about our species. If so, that makes this book more valuable, not less.So think of this book (and Morris's others) as a way to give your "I" a little distance on your "me," if you know what I mean. And yes, that does mean that I'm recommending a couple of books on evolutionary anthropology as helpful to your spirituality.

Excellent study companion to Naked Ape

After reading The Naked Ape, I was driven to read this next installment of the "human trilogy" by D.M. I found that it delved even further into the methods to our "civilized madness." Morris brings to light the true effect of civilization on our species. This book effectively explains the stresses and effects that our cities have placed upon our animal nature. I recommend this book to any person who is interested in human behavior. I believe it takes the eye of an ethologist to separate bias from interpretation. Morris accomplishes this swimmingly as he attaches biological meaning to even our most spiritual behaviors.