Animal exhibits have evolved by gradually closing the distance between animal and spectator.


First, audiences demanded a closer look at the animals, then a chance to actually touch them or swim with them. Te latest phase is to feel what it’s like to be that animal. Zoos are deliberately blurring the boundaries, letting viewers into the animal’s habitat.


PGAV zoological designer Stacey Tarpley emphasizes the power of “sharing the air—it’s totally different looking at a tiger through net and not behind glass. You can hear the little chuffs as he breathes.”


In Antarctica: Empire of the Penguin, a trackless vehicle runs on magnets and gives riders a penguin’s point of view.


Te Cheetah Hunt at Busch Gardens Tampa loops down and hugs the ground, streaking past the Cheetah Run grassland just the way a cheetah hunts. When people ride SeaWorld Orlando’s Manta Coaster and swim with the manta rays aſterward, a soaring grace fills their landlocked bodies.


Te intimacy of such an experience changes a guest’s point of view, sometimes forever. Kids visiting the polar bear exhibit in Brookfield Zoo’s Great Bear Wilderness play a game, jumping from one piece of ice to the next, and as the game goes on, the “ice floes” spread farther and farther apart. Te kids giggle and groan and make wild leaps—and they realize just what the polar bears face in the Arctic.


Aſter interviewing Gay Talese for Te Paris Review, Katie Roiphe wrote, “His method is to go as deeply as possible into character, to burrow into a single psyche, as a way of capturing the spirit of the times.”


A DESTINATION CAN DO THE SAME. CHAPTER FOUR 49


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