Animals That Live Outside of the Zoo are Still Safe Creatures

In the novel Life of Pi, the author Yann Martel shows how animals like to have boundaries. A pool has its boundaries like a taboo, something safe, something with security. Our conventions as humans is that we want to believe that animals are safer in the zoo than animals in the wild; we also think wild animals are dangerous, but , like humans inside a home all their life and others that live on the streets, we are still one of the same. “[E]scaped zoo animals are not dangerous absconding criminals but simply wild creatures seeking to fit in.” (42) In Plato’s Allegory Cave, one man escapes the cave in search of what true life is like rather than trapped in a cave. This man and these animals are the same in that they want to fit in with the normal style of life for their species. We have the convention that unsheltered things are unsafe, therefore, escaped zoo animals are unsafe, however. The man in the cave was completely harmless, he just had the curiosity of what the rest of life was like, so these animals that have escaped from the zoo strive to discover what their species is like outside of the zoo walls and want to unify with the rest of their kind.