Chapter 5 - Pleasure

Summary

To understand and categorize their visitors, zoos and aquariums have historically focused on demographic labels such as age, ethnicity, social group, level of formal education, and frequency of visitation, or marketing categories such as “educational” versus “leisure” visitors. Chapter 5 takes a layered look at the visiting phenomenon, noting that while natural history museums, art galleries, and zoological gardens all feature collections curated for presentation and public interpretation, the former settings are typically considered high-culture destinations for learning, whereas zoos and aquariums have no such status and are often trivialized as contexts for recreation and amusement. Building from psychological understandings of positive psychology and various conditions that provoke pleasure, fun, meaning-making, and emotional response experiences, we explore the distinct value of the zoo as a social place of educational leisure that offers public audiences many points of sensory stimulation and potential engagement due to the proximity of numerous types and taxa of live animal.