Do Like the Animals Do!

A Public Service Announcement for DenveRhetor

View more presentations from nicksantucci8.

As I walk into the Wildlife Halls at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, I mentally transform back into my five-year-old self. I look at all of the displays in the halls and travel from the arctic to the savannah to the forest. I am mesmerized by the animals and their ways of life. In all of the exhibits, I notice a mom, a dad and little babies all working together to create a productive environment. Then, at some point, I transform back into my 19-year-old self and realize that everything the museum has portrayed as ordinary life for a variety of different species is inherently unnatural. Although the museum would like me to think otherwise, not all animals mate for life and nurture their young. Nature is nature, and it is not a fairytale. However, the museum’s primary objective here is not present the realities of nature, but rather to enforce popular human culture upon the easily influenced minds that enter through the doors of the Wildlife Halls.
In order to convey the ridiculousness of the museum’s Wildlife Halls setup, I have chosen to create a pseudo- Public Service Announcement that reinforces the museum’s “Positive Moral Value” system. These “Positive Moral Values” – that is traditional marriage, pro-life, family and friendship ideals – are not necessarily correct, they are just the most popular in American society (and obviously the ones the museum is trying to help preserve). Since young kids are perhaps the most impressionable and the ones most likely to be visiting the Wildlife Halls, the museum is trying to force their idea of positive values onto the kids in hopes that they will use them in their adult life. However, upon listening to my Public Service Announcement, it becomes clear that human traditions (which have been created in a specific cultural context, for different cultures have different traditions) are completely nonrelated to animal interactions. For example, animals do not marry like humans do. In fact, most male animals leave their female mate once the babies are born (and there are no divorce proceedings, for it is merely their way of life). Animals also do not preserve pro-life values, for many mothers abandon their babies in the wild which results in the death of those babies. Therefore, the objective of my Public Service Announcement is neither to persuade one to abide by popular societal values nor to explicitly reveal the workings of nature, but rather to make a subtle argument that challenges the listener to identify the evident flaw in the museum’s forms of persuasion.
The reality has always been, and will continue to be, that humans are not animals and vice versa. Animalistic ways are unnatural in regards to human nature, and ultimately there is not much to learn about human life in an animal’s. Although my five-year-old self wants to believe that monkeys get married, have kids, and live as a family forever, my 19-year-old self is less naïve. Animals do not build a culture like humans do; animals live in nature and have essentially been living the same ways since they first came into existence. Human traditions have evolved and changed over time, and ultimately cannot be compared to the ways of the natural world.