Tbilisi zoo tragedy: the pathos of an escaped hippo

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/08/tbilisi-zoo-tragedy-the-pathos-of-an-escaped-hippo

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Pity is a strange thing. Tragedy in classical theory is supposed to inspire both pity and terror, but the daily horror and violence of world news often leave us struggling to produce those responses. While we might, in principle, be shocked by James Joyce’s irritating character Stephen Dedalus when he says in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that a death in a road accident cannot be truly tragic because it is “remote from terror and pity according to the terms of my definitions”, the reality is that no one can really feel on cue the emotions apparently required of us by a daily news stream of anniversaries of bombings and economies on the brink. But a hippo being shot with a tranquiliser dart in a flooded city street is another matter entirely.

Related: The tragedy of Tbilisi zoo – what happened next?

Who would not be upset by the strange spectacle of a hippopotamus, suddenly freed from its zoo enclosure by torrents of water, wandering dumbly and innocently through a new world of streets and floating cars, nibbling at the leaves above, until it was cornered and a pink dart was fired into in its lumbering body?

The pathos of Tbilisi’s escaped, and in many cases slaughtered, animals lies in their innocence and ignorance. This quality of complete helplessness before the human world and the inability to talk it through, as it were, is what makes animals, from loyal pets to wildebeest crossing crocodile-infested rivers, such sure-fire magnets of human feeling.

The bears, lions, tigers, wolves, hyenas and penguins of Tbilisi already lived in the unnatural, mystifying environment of a zoo. Suddenly, these creatures were released by flooding. Then, as they explored a changed reality, they were tranquilised or, shot dead. The photographs of this surreal mayhem are unbearably sad. It is completely reasonable that, even though this disaster took human lives and turned an entire city upside down, the pictures people fixed on were those of a bear perched on a house’s air conditioning unit – probably before being shot – or a dead tiger being carried away on a stretcher.

Tblisi briefly became a wilderness full of dangerous beasts. Tigers in zoos do not know they are prisoners – they still think they are at the top of the food chain and size up every visitor and keeper as prey. This tiger managed to kill a man before it was shot in the act, it was claimed, of attacking a police officer. It did what came naturally and now it is dead. Its removal on a stretcher at least has a shred of dignity. The most horrible pictures of Tbilisi’s slaughtered animals show corpses abandoned on riverbanks or in the mud. A boy gingerly prods a dead lion’s carcass with his foot. A sleuth of bears lie slaughtered in the mud like a friends battalion from the first world war.

That anthroporphism is unavoidable. It is also what makes these images of disaster so compelling. Human dignity rightly forbids us to look on the corpses of drowned strangers from our own species, but animals – as in the art of Damien Hirst or the painter George Stubbs – can carry the burden of a larger tragedy. Zoos, bizarrely, are often at the centre of disaster zones. The carnage in Tbilisi followed comparable chaos in zoos in the Ukraine and Iraq caused not by nature but war. Pity the animals. And pity the world that makes victims and symbols of them.