Animal Exhibits and the Ethics of Display (or, On My Unease with Museums)
I really enjoyed Season 6 of The Animal Highlight, led by Rosa Dyer. The season focused primarily on animals – or rather animal remains – exhibited in museums, but it gradually expanded its scope, first to insects actually living inside museums, and then to broader questions about what kinds of animal spaces might themselves function as museums, including zoos.
Museums have always fascinated me. My parents – a teacher and an archaeologist, both very much old-school, European humanists – believed that visiting a place meant visiting its museums (and its churches). So museums became part of the rhythm of travel in my childhood and adolescence. I still carry that habit with me today, partly, I suppose, because of imprinting and partly because of cultural conditioning. This season therefore spoke to me very directly. In particular, it articulated an unease I have gradually developed toward museums in general, and natural history museums in particular.
Part of that unease is philosophical (I cannot entirely divest myself of the philosopher’s robe, even when listening to a podcast): museums are institutions deeply entangled with colonialism, imperialism, and extractivism; they frame objects outside their original contexts, thereby transforming them and their meaning; they classify, represent, and commodify them according to specifically Western systems of knowledge and power; etc.
But my unease is also much more personal, and older than any theoretical reflection. Natural history museums always produced in me a strange mixture of fascination and revulsion. As a child, I was irresistibly drawn to animals in all the forms our culture presents them – books, documentaries, zoos, exhibitions. Yet natural history museums (even more than zoos at that time) unsettled me in a way I could not fully understand. These exhibits, these objects, displayed before our consuming gaze for entertainment or “education,” were once living beings. Most were killed precisely in order to become exhibits, stuffed and arranged under glass for visitors like me. Whenever that thought entered my mind, fascination gave way to disgust. (Today, of course, I feel a much stronger revulsion toward zoos, where animals are not “museified” in death but in life. I will return to this later).
In fact, the ethical questions surrounding museums are central throughout the season and return repeatedly, especially in episode 8 with Herre de Bondt and Rebecca Shen. Rosa never simplifies these issues, and one of the strengths of the series is precisely its refusal to offer easy resolutions. A recurring question is whether these collections – despite all the justified criticisms of museums as colonial and extractive institutions – still retain value for science. Rosa seems inclined to answer yes, though always cautiously and ambiguously. The question is not only whether we can collect, kill, or imprison living beings “in the name of science,” but whether scientific knowledge can ever justify the violence involved. Personally, I find it difficult to answer positively: if asked whether scientific advancement automatically outweighs individual (animal) life, my instinctive answer is no. Yet Rosa rightly insists on another uncomfortable truth: these collections have undeniably produced knowledge, and continue to do so. Ethical ambiguity is therefore inescapable, and museums force us to inhabit contradiction.
For me the question becomes much easier when we turn to the zoo, the subject of episode 7. Despite increasingly sophisticated campaigns presenting zoos as institutions of conservation, education, and research, I find them ethically indefensible. Their true raison d’être still seems to me to be entertainment – and actually quite lowbrow entertainment – disguised as moral concern. Listening to the episode also brought me back to John Berger’s famous argument that zoos make genuine encounters between humans and animals impossible. But perhaps the same could be said of museums: in natural history museums – and perhaps in museums more generally – true encounters with what is exhibited become impossible.
Removed from their original worlds, reframed and recontextualized according to cultural and institutional logics, animals and objects alike become “exhibits,” and as such they lose something essential and become unreachable. What we ultimately encounter is not the animal (the exhibit) itself, but just the reflection of our own power over the world.
Many other questions emerge throughout the series. One of the most important is the critique of the museum as a specifically Western institution, contrasted with other ways of relating to animals and to the nonhuman world. These alternatives are not necessarily less exploitative, but exploitative in different ways. The concept of “violent care” appears in this context, but for me, the phrase feels almost oxymoronic – though I freely admit my own biases here. “Care” becomes a deeply problematic concept whenever it is deployed within structures of domination and exploitation (including non-Western ones), and we see this language everywhere, including in animal husbandry. To me, however, something essential in the meaning of care is lost when it is mobilized to justify captivity, control, or extraction. But perhaps that reaction itself reflects my own intellectual and cultural limits.
Another (for me) important issue is “agency,” discussed already in the first episode. Can museum objects – especially animal remains – still possess agency in the sense proposed by actor-network theory? Certainly, their presence has effects; things happen because they are there. But is that enough to call it agency? I have fairly strong intuitions about this, but I also recognize that the question remains open. And perhaps this openness was precisely what I appreciated most about the season. It raised questions without resolving them too neatly and unsettled assumptions I did not even realize I carried. Good podcasts – like good philosophy – do exactly that.
In the end, despite all my doubts, discomfort, and criticism, I still took my son to the local natural history museum, and to others as well. I refused to take him to the zoo, of course – his mother handled that part. But the distinction itself probably reveals more ambiguity than certainty.
Perhaps, somewhere beneath my unease, I still believe museums can offer something valuable: not innocence, certainly, and not moral purity, but perhaps occasions for reflection, curiosity, and even self-critique. What this season clarified for me is that my discomfort is not a reason to turn away from museums altogether. Rather, it may be the most honest way of entering them: aware that fascination and violence, wonder and domination, knowledge and exploitation have always been entangled there.
So thank you to Rosa, Claudia, Rebecca, and Herre for helping me cultivate and refine an unease I have carried for a very long time. That’s what good podcasts do.
Carlo Salzani is a research fellow at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna, Austria, where he leads the project “Animal Suffering and the Politics of Shame,” funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). He is also a member and co-founder of the Vienna Animal Studies Group. His latest book, Animals, Empathy, and Anthropomorphism: The Limits of Imagination, was published in open access by Palgrave Macmillan in 2025.
Comments