President Donald Trump’s sweeping vary of greater than 130 government orders and different choices purpose to upend the entirety from long-standing immigration coverage to the keep watch over of a appearing arts middle.
However thus far, zoos aren’t some of the many problems the Trump management has desirous about.
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 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 suggested Vice President JD Vance to ferret out “improper ideology” on the Smithsonian Establishment, a gaggle of museums and analysis facilities created and funded through the government.
The chief order additionally implemented to the Nationwide Zoo in Washington, D.C., which has been a part of the Smithsonian since 1890.
For Trump’s critics, the advice that zoos may well be indoctrinating guests used to be absurd.
NBC “Late Night” host Seth Meyers joked concerning the government order on his display 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 will have to come as no wonder. Zoos cross to nice lengths to painting themselves as scientifically purpose and politically impartial.
But as a pupil of wars’ results on American tradition and society, I do know that zoos have at all times been ideological, sending refined – and now not so refined – messages about subjects that experience little to do with animals.
Traditionally, zoos were used to justify colonial exploitation. They have got lent weight to eugenicist concepts about racial hierarchy. And they’ve served as backdrops for a wide variety of political theater.
All through the Twenties and Thirties, for instance, Italian strongman Benito Mussolini appreciated to climb throughout the lion cage on the Rome Zoo to show the braveness and energy 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 during periods of warfare.
Benito Mussolini, the longtime fascist dictator of Italy, visits a zoo in Rome in 1924.
Global warfare zoos
Zoo possession and investment fashions rely at the particular person zoo, however many zoos obtain a minimum of some executive investment to perform.
Initially of Global Warfare II, maximum governments required zoos to embody an ideology of sacrifice – a willingness to set the desires of the state above their very own.
For zoos in North The united states and the British Empire, this supposed slashing staff’ pay, rationing meals provides and providing uniformed infantrymen particular get admission to to zoo amenities.
It additionally supposed destroying animals regarded as a danger to public protection, particularly within the match of a bombing or attack that would set them loose. In 1939, the London Zoo killed greater than 200 animals, beginning with the black widow spiders and venomous snakes. Different zoos did the similar, slaughtering their animal collections as a precaution in opposition to imaginable break out.
Joan the hippo on the London Zoo will get a drink of water in June 1939.
Fox Pictures/Getty Pictures
Authoritarian governments right through Global Warfare II exercised virtually overall keep watch over over their international locations’ 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 international locations.
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 combat. Beginning in August 1943, zoo team of workers shot, electrocuted, stabbed and strangled greater than 20 animals, together with a polar undergo, an American bison, a python and a leopard cub.
Tokyo’s zoo additionally starved to dying 3 elephants named Jon, Tonki and Hanako. Weeks after the zoo held an reputable funeral for its animals, two of the 3 elephants that weren’t if truth be told lifeless endured to undergo, their cages coated in bunting so the general public would now not see the ghastly proof.
Even because the preventing raged, the Soviet executive directed its zoos to broaden sensible measures to lend a hand the warfare effort. On the Moscow Zoo, team of workers taught other people easy methods to breed mice and rabbits for clinical packages, similar to vaccine trying out.
All of the whilst, Soviet zoo workers needed to show ideological vigilance within the place of work. Any slipup may imply reputable sanction, lack of place or worse.
Chilly Warfare zoos
All through the Chilly Warfare, governments all over the world endured to view zoos thru an ideological lens.
This used to be very true in Berlin, the place the town’s two zoos – one within the capitalist West, the opposite within the communist East – was symbols of competing ideological worldviews.
No zoo animals have been extra ideologically fraught within the Chilly Warfare than massive pandas, endemic to the forested mountains of central China.
Within the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties, American zoos have been denied permission through the U.S. executive to import pandas from China. The State Division regarded as 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, right through a thawing of the Chilly Warfare, famously returned from China with Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, the primary massive pandas who have been proficient to and exhibited within the U.S. in a long time.
The Nationwide Zoo unveiled China’s newest “soft power ambassadors” in January 2025. 3-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.
