President Donald Trump’s sweeping vary of more than 130 executive orders and different choices goal to upend all the things from long-standing immigration policy to the management of a performing arts center.
However to date, zoos aren’t among the many many points the Trump administration has targeted on.
That may now not be the case.
Trump issued an government order on March 27, 2025, to revive “truth and sanity” at federal historical past websites.
“Over the previous decade, People have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s historical past,” Trump wrote in the executive order, “changing information with a distorted narrative pushed by ideology somewhat than reality.” As a corrective, he instructed Vice President JD Vance to ferret out “improper ideology” on the Smithsonian Institution, a bunch of museums and analysis facilities created and funded by the federal authorities.
The manager order additionally utilized to the Nationwide Zoo in Washington, D.C., which has been a part of the Smithsonian since 1890.
For Trump’s critics, the suggestion that zoos may be indoctrinating visitors was absurd.
NBC “Late Night time” host Seth Meyers joked concerning the government order on his present on April 2, characterizing it as proof of an authoritarian character.
“Significantly, what the hell is ‘improper’ ideology on the zoo? Trump is beginning to get into bizarre dictator s—,” Meyers stated.
Meyers’ astonishment ought to come as no shock. Zoos go to nice lengths to painting themselves as scientifically goal and politically impartial.
But as a scholar of wars’ effects on American tradition and society, I do know that zoos have all the time been ideological, sending delicate – and never so delicate – messages about subjects which have little to do with animals.
Traditionally, zoos have been used to justify colonial exploitation. They’ve lent weight to eugenicist ideas about racial hierarchy. They usually have served as backdrops for all types of political theater.
Throughout the Twenties and Nineteen Thirties, for instance, Italian strongman Benito Mussolini appreciated to climb contained in the lion cage on the Rome Zoo to show the braveness and vitality he related to fascist politics.
As I argue in my 2025 ebook “World War Zoos: Humans and Other Animals in the Deadliest Conflict of the Modern Age,” the hyperlinks between zoos and nationwide politics are particularly pronounced in intervals of warfare.
World warfare zoos
Zoo possession and funding fashions rely upon the person zoo, however many zoos obtain a minimum of some authorities funding to function.
Initially of World Conflict II, most governments required zoos to embrace an ideology of sacrifice – a willingness to set the wants of the state above their very own.
For zoos in North America and the British Empire, this meant slashing employees’ pay, rationing meals provides and providing uniformed troopers particular entry to zoo services.
It additionally meant destroying animals thought-about a menace to public security, particularly within the occasion of a bombing or assault that would set them free. In 1939, the London Zoo killed greater than 200 animals, beginning with the black widow spiders and venomous snakes. Different zoos did the identical, slaughtering their animal collections as a precaution in opposition to doable escape.
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Authoritarian governments throughout World Conflict II exercised nearly whole management over their nations’ zoos.
Beneath Adolf Hitler, German zoos enforced “Aryan-only” visitation insurance policies, festooned their grounds with swastikas, hosted galas for Nazi dignitaries and exhibited animals looted from zoos in occupied nations.
In Japan, the governor of Tokyo ordered the Ueno Zoo to hold out a sequence of “propaganda killings” aimed toward strengthening public dedication to the wartime battle. Beginning in August 1943, zoo workers shot, electrocuted, stabbed and strangled greater than 20 animals, together with a polar bear, an American bison, a python and a leopard cub.
Tokyo’s zoo additionally starved to dying three elephants named Jon, Tonki and Hanako. Weeks after the zoo held an official funeral for its animals, two of the three elephants that weren’t really useless continued to undergo, their cages coated in bunting so the general public wouldn’t see the ghastly proof.
Even because the combating raged, the Soviet authorities directed its zoos to develop sensible measures to assist the warfare effort. On the Moscow Zoo, workers taught individuals tips on how to breed mice and rabbits for medical purposes, resembling vaccine testing.
All of the whereas, Soviet zoo staff needed to show ideological vigilance within the office. Any slipup may imply official sanction, lack of place or worse.
Chilly Conflict zoos
Throughout the Chilly Conflict, governments all over the world continued to view zoos by means of an ideological lens.
This was very true in Berlin, the place the town’s two zoos – one within the capitalist West, the opposite within the communist East – turned symbols of competing ideological worldviews.
No zoo animals have been extra ideologically fraught within the Chilly Conflict than large pandas, endemic to the forested mountains of central China.
Within the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties, American zoos have been denied permission by the U.S. authorities to import pandas from China. The State Division thought-about them “enemy goods.”
That modified in 1972, when President Richard Nixon, throughout a thawing of the Chilly Conflict, famously returned from China with Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, the primary large pandas who have been gifted to and exhibited within the U.S. in a long time.
The Nationwide Zoo unveiled China’s newest “soft power ambassadors” in January 2025. Three-year-old pandas Bao Li and Qing Bao are set to stay in D.C. for 10 years – lengthy sufficient to win the hearts and minds of thousands and thousands of zoo guests.
