This post is not about marketing, but just something I wanted to share.
Animals in the zoo are living so much longer than they would in the wild that vets are beginning to see signs of aging that they have never seen before. Monkeys developing dementia. Animals with grey hair coming out. Gorillas going into menopause, etc. These effects are not seen in the wild because animals as they age lose their competitive edge and are naturally eliminated by predators.
This news reminded me of Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative of 1966, and Desmond Morris’ The Human Zoo of 1969, where we first started thinking of humans as being essentially in captivity. Morris contended that human beings living in proximity closer than two square miles per person were essentially like animals in a zoo, and began to exhibit behavior (crimes and violence) not exhibited in the wild.
Zoos may not be good for behavior of either animals or humans, but apparently we both live longer away from our natural habitat, and surprise, surprise, we both develop similar conditions as we live longer than we were meant to.
I just wanted to share.
This is an interesting phenomenon. This past April Barbara Walters hosted an ABC special about the possibility of younger generations living to be 150 years old. The reporting had a very optimistic, even triumphant tone. With a combination of high-tech drugs and lab-grown organs, it isn’t far fetched either. But we have to assume that cheating death has a cost. Even in our current hospital environment, its often hard to tell the difference between enabling somebody to live and forcing them to live. Its even hard to agree on what constitutes “alive”. My sister is a nurse and was discussing this situation with me. She wisely noted that we’re so obsessed with staying alive that we’ve drawn our attention away from quality of life. Really, this is what medicine should seek to increase. Of course, I’m as thankful for our urgent-care and life-saving technologies as the next guy (or lady), but where do we draw the line?