President Donald Trump’s sweeping vary of greater than 130 government orders and different selections intention to upend all the pieces from long-standing immigration coverage to the management of a performing arts heart.
However thus far, zoos should not among the many many points the Trump administration has centered on.
Which may 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 past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history,” Trump wrote within the government order, “replacing facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” As a corrective, he instructed Vice President JD Vance to ferret out “improper ideology” on the Smithsonian Establishment, a bunch of museums and analysis facilities created and funded by the federal authorities.
The chief 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 is likely to be indoctrinating guests was absurd.
NBC “Late Night” host Seth Meyers joked in regards to the government order on his present on April 2, characterizing it as proof of an authoritarian character.
“Seriously, what the hell is ‘improper’ ideology at the zoo? Trump is starting to get into weird 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’ results on American tradition and society, I do know that zoos have at all times been ideological, sending delicate – and never so delicate – messages about matters which have little to do with animals.
Traditionally, zoos have been used to justify colonial exploitation. They’ve lent weight to eugenicist concepts about racial hierarchy. They usually have served as backdrops for every kind of political theater.
In the course of the Nineteen Twenties and Nineteen Thirties, for instance, Italian strongman Benito Mussolini preferred to climb contained in the lion cage on the Rome Zoo to display the braveness and vitality he related to fascist politics.
As I argue in my 2025 e-book “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 battle.
Benito Mussolini, the longtime fascist dictator of Italy, visits a zoo in Rome in 1924.
World battle zoos
Zoo possession and funding fashions rely upon the person zoo, however many zoos obtain at the very least some authorities funding to function.
At the beginning of World Struggle 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 risk 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 towards potential escape.
Joan the hippo on the London Zoo will get a drink of water in June 1939.
Fox Pictures/Getty Photographs
Authoritarian governments throughout World Struggle II exercised virtually complete management over their nations’ zoos.
Underneath 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 collection of “propaganda killings” aimed toward strengthening public dedication to the wartime wrestle. 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 loss of life 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 preventing raged, the Soviet authorities directed its zoos to develop sensible measures to assist the battle effort. On the Moscow Zoo, workers taught individuals find out how to breed mice and rabbits for medical functions, resembling vaccine testing.
All of the whereas, Soviet zoo workers needed to display ideological vigilance within the office. Any slipup might imply official sanction, lack of place or worse.
Chilly Struggle zoos
In the course of the Chilly Struggle, governments world wide continued to view zoos by 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 – grew to become symbols of competing ideological worldviews.
No zoo animals have been extra ideologically fraught within the Chilly Struggle than big pandas, endemic to the forested mountains of central China.
Within the Nineteen 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.”
First woman Pat Nixon welcomes pandas to the Nationwide Zoo in Washington, D.C., in 1972.
That modified in 1972, when President Richard Nixon, throughout a thawing of the Chilly Struggle, famously returned from China with Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, the primary big 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 hundreds of thousands of zoo guests.
