Chimpanzees huddle near a heat lamp for warmth in their cage on a cold winter day in Hefei, China.

I promised to post a short edit of my project documenting China’s urban zoos a couple weeks ago, and it’s taken me a bit longer than expected to get it up here. Here it is, finally.

China’s zoos are just about the most depressing place in the world. Once beautiful, once majestic, the animals are, in some cases quite literally, wasting away in their cages. I’ve seen animals with open, festering sores (the puma below), a cow whose overgrown hooves looked skis (pictures couldn’t be made), muzzled animals performing for screaming fans or posing for photographs (the bear below), and countless animals either listless and unkempt in their filthy confines, or angry and frustrated, pacing back and forth in their too small cages.

Visitors crowd around the entrance of the Tianjin Zoo in Tianjin, China.

Visitors gather around the entrance to the lion and tiger house at the Tianjin Zoo in Tianjin, China.

The zoos are enormously popular. From Beijing in the north to Sanya in the south, and many places inbetween (Hefei, Shanghai, Nanjing, Qingdao, Tianjin, and elsewhere) the conditions of the animals are uniformly awful. But the crowds pour in. Ticket prices are low, sometimes less than a dollar and never more than 5 dollars per person, it’s a cheap and easy way to entertain children and the family for the day. Just as in the rest of the world, the zoos offer the only chance for the Chinese population (majority urban, as of this year) to come face to face with the wide wild world outside of the cities. In China, again much like in the rest of the world, the development of these cities is a major reason that these animals’ habitat is disappearing. There are greater problems in China, surely, but the zoos serve as stark contrast between China’s once great wilderness and its now great cities.

An injured black panther lays on the cement floor of its cage in the Qingdao Zoo in Qingdao, Shandong, China.

Photos of tourists posing with a captive bear hang on a wall near a bear enclosure at the Tianjin Zoo in Tianjin, China.

 I started going to zoos when I first moved to China in fall 2007, mostly due to an episode of the excellent radio show Radiolab about the development of zoos from the Roman Coliseum to now. China is by no means the only culprit in the horrible treatment of captive animals. Abuse in zoos and circuses is widespread, and the world’s leading zoos only started housing animals in habitat-style cages in the 1970s, starting with a gorilla enclosure at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. China’s well behind the curve on the refurbishment of their urban zoos, but there are glimmers of hope.

Visitors to the Beijing Zoo surround a squirrel monkey enclosure in Beijing, China.

An asian black bear stands against the wall of a dirty, feces-covered enclosure at the Qingdao Zoo in Qingdao, Shandong, China. The asian black bear is listed as a vulnerable species.

In many of the zoos, the most active and most popular animals now live in enclosures approaching a habitat. The zoo in Hefei, Anhui Province, where the chimpanzee picture at the top of the post was taken, recently opened a large, open grassy and rocky area for their tigers. Pandas often have open play spaces, and macaques and other small monkeys usually live in so-called “Monkey Hills,” which resemble playground jungle gyms. But more often that not, the animals in these zoos spend the majority of their time in small, dirty concrete and iron boxes.

Visitors to the Tianjin Zoo feed bunches of leaves to giraffes in Tianjin, China.

A visitor to the zoo poses with a bear wearing a muzzle in the Tianjin Zoo in Tianjin, China.

I started photographing the project in black and white, but quickly switched to color when I saw the conditions of the cages. The chimpanzee picture at the top, for instance, relies on the color difference between the warm glow of a heater and the cold, snowy landscape outside. The bright color of peeling paint on the walls of an empty macaque enclosure would lose its impact in black and white. The animals’ vibrant fur contrasts strongly against the drab concrete.

Hand-painted walls decorate an empty cage for macaque monkeys at the Beijing Zoo in Beijing, China.

A girl feeds junk food to a group of raccoons in the Qingdao Zoo in Qingdao, Shandong, China.

Two major themes in the work, reflections and iron bars, came about as efforts to illustrate the animals’ captivity. The bars offer a literal metaphor to prisons and jails. In many western zoos, these iron bars no longer exist, but in China, they give the animal something to fight against. A bear wraps its claws around the fencing, or a cheetah tries to stare down visitors only to have its eyes, the very weapon of its ferocity, blocked by the cage. In the picture of the Pere David’s deer with cut antlers, the bars strip the animal of its identity, just as when its antlers were removed.

A cheetah paces in an outdoor cage in the Tianjin Zoo in Tianjin, China.

Tourists pose with a seal as zookeepers stand nearby at the Hefei Zoo in Hefei, China.

The monkey honor guard waits to begin a show for tourists at Monkey Island near Lingshui, Hainan, China.

An elephant stands in a small concrete and metal cage in the zoo in Nanjing, China.

The reflections give the viewer the chance to see what lies beyond the cage and, in fact, beyond the frame of the picture. Whether a desolate snowy landscape, luscious foliage, or the crowded press of tourists, the animals are often far removed from even their most immediate surroundings. This is both good and bad. The glass (partially, in the case of the raccoons) prevents the crowds from feeding junk food to the animal or throwing water bottles at them, but for others it means they can’t reach their source for food and other necessities.

A Pere Davids Deer with cut antlers stands in a pen in the Qingdao Zoo in Qingdao, Shandong, China. Pere Davids Deer has existed only in captivity since the late 1800s. The antlers from the species are used in Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Visitors crowd around a giant panda enclosure at the Tianjin Zoo in Tianjin, China.

As I wrote above, the conditions are slowly improving. Here’s hoping that they’ll continue on the path toward adequate and humane facilities for the animals.

A lion lays motionless on the floor of a small, dirty cage in the lion and tiger house of the Tianjin Zoo in Tianjin, China.

photos and words (c) M. Scott Brauer. Contact Scott for licensing: scott dot brauer at gmail dot com.