by Jeff Barrus

EDITOR

It's as easy to like a place for the things it doesn't have as the things it does. For example, I like Tooele because it doesn't have Salt Lake City's smog and traffic. I like that we have no Pioneer Park and no Eddie Bauer outlets. And I especially like that we have no zoo.

I partially blame Tooele County for my unusual hatred of zoos. As a kid in Grantsville, I used to roam far and wide in search of wild animals. In winter, I trudged through thigh-deep snow with a .22 over my shoulder hunting cottontails. In summer, I used to hike up to South Willow Lake with my cousin and camp beneath the tall pines there, watching the hawks whirl above and the deer come up to drink at dusk, for days on end until our food ran out.

Out of those experiences, I discovered a peculiar affinity for watching and waiting for wildlife to show up. Aside from a few kooky birders -- of which I am also one -- this is not a pastime everyone understands. For me, however, even the most fleeting glimpse of an animal in its world is more thrilling than zoofulls of the same creature lying comatose on a concrete slab.

Zoos should have gone extinct in the 19th century, but somehow they've survived even as the wild animals have died off. I have reasons for hating zoos: First, they're welfare cases. In fact, Hogle Zoo hatched a plan just this month to hit up taxpayers for another $65 million. Second, their captive breeding programs exist mainly to ship animals to other zoos, not to preserve species that need preserving. Third, in draining away so much money that would be better spent on saving habitat -- which is the real crisis of our times -- zoos are essentially fiddling while Rome burns. Finally, and most hypocritically, they do little to educate kids about animals or encourage conservation.

Think about it: A kid's first question when he sees, for example, a rhino lying inert in its shadeless, pawed-up enclosure, is "Why isn't he doing anything?" The answer is that a rhino in a zoo isn't really a rhino. He doesn't have to find food, fight off rivals, mate or do anything else a rhino would do in the wild. In the wild, a rhino will travel 15 miles a day to get to water. When you shrink that range to a patch of dirt and cement smaller than a basketball court, you kill every instinct God gave the animal. It's like watching a famous actor on life support and wondering why he's not more entertaining.

I've seen plenty of animals in the wild, but I mention rhinos because they're a personal favorite. I once spent a week tracking one-horned rhinos in the jungles of Java on assignment for a magazine. Another time, I was charged by a white rhino protecting her calf in South Africa. (She pulled up short, thankfully.) In both places, I walked and waited a lot, and saw few signs of my quarry. But I learned something: Even the search for something rare and wild is much more rewarding than seeing an animal caged in front of you.

Zoos try to strip away an animal's mystery by not even giving it a rock to hide behind. If kids want to learn about wildlife, they'd be better off to watch the Discovery Channel than visit the zoo. But there's a third way: appreciate the wilderness we have in our own backyard. A woodpecker boring into an aspen or an antelope sprinting through the sage brush are magical sights we should never take for granted.

At a time when most people live in cities and the connection to wild places seems more tenuous than ever, we are lucky to be living in Tooele County with its vast open spaces and abundant wildlife. Guarding those wild places, rather than taming them, is the new mark of civilization.

Last Saturday, I climbed up to South Willow Lake again, this time with my wife and 5-year-old son. We showed him a spot where, 15 years ago, a cougar had paced around our tent one morning. He'd heard the story a dozen times before, but wanted to hear it again. Even secondhand, an encounter with a wild animal is worth more than any trip to the zoo.