Zoos aren’t entirely free of philosophical problems. Every information card at London Zoo now carries a statement of how fucked is the particular species to which it relates. On at least the larger cards, all possible values are printed, greyed out apart from the value that relates to the species in question, which is highlighted in red. The possible values are:

1. Not currently threatened
2. Threatened
3. Endangered
4. Critical
5. Extinct in the wild

The cat 1’s all look a bit humdrum, the average score seems to be about 3.5, and it feels like the cards are suggesting that all species are ratcheting up through the categories. There are a good few category 5’s, including a species of Cichlid fish that seems to have been a 4 the moment it was discovered and a 5 within about twenty minutes. I assume that the naturalist who first ID’d the fish got over-excited and accidentally kicked a can of creosote into its stream while dancing with scientific triumph.

And there’s a subtext, unprinted, to every card: TOO MANY PEOPLE. And in this regard zoos are especially conflicted. They do best when they get plenty of punters through the gates, but their deep message gets sadder and sadder the higher the human population rises. David Attenbourough has spoken out recently about the dangers of human overpopulation, that there are three times as many people now than there were when he first started broadcasting. And this is where we have to start thinking about what the world needs rather than what we need – we very much need to start thinking further outside the box – because what the world needs is for us to get the fuck sterilised. They should be handing that leaflet out at the turnstiles, offering the operation for free under local in a small white building on the ticket piazza. “Got children sir? Can we clip your sperm ducts?”

Because I think, if there was a way for them to coordinate themselves, a way for them to understand the issues and evidence and be empowered to seek solutions, that the rest of the animal kingdom would definitely be considering a deep cull of the human population at the moment.

“The problem is that they’ve got language, they’ve got this learnt system for dodging Malthusian limits on their population growth. It’s just not a level playing field. So we were thinking about culling them down. Not right to extinction, just to levels that we can all deal with, maybe a few tens of thousands. We were thinking about trying to limit them to a few mediterranean islands.”

“The problem is, if you look at the population spread models here, that they’ve got a load of written instructions for travelling around really fast, exploiting loads of different environments, and we think that if we leave enough of them, in sufficient numbers and in a rich enough environment, they’ll just break out and we’ll have a pandemic again.”

“We’re hopeful that, given how fucked the world is in general, if we can smash them into small groups, perhaps around a dozen, perhaps twenty or so at a push, and focus hard on keeping group size down around that level, they won’t be able to organise into social structures within which roles are sufficiently specialised to support written language, or indeed many of the specialised vocabularies and dialects they use now, so that might be a way to go: very small groups, total population of around twnety thousand, something along those lines. The question now is about how we organise all this without the tragedy of a huge boom and bust in the populations of carrion predator species, too.”

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