Zooicide: Seeing Cruelty, Demanding Abolition

In Zooicide, Sue Coe employs her bold artistic style to confront the institution of zoos. They are, she says, inherently cruel and the solution is not to reform them, but to abolish them. Coe’s visual journalism investigates the mental anguish inflicted upon animals - including cases where they have killed themselves to end their torture. As a vital complement to Coe’s images, and written specifically for them, Stephen F. Eisenman’s essay, ‘The Capitalist Zoo,’ is a history of zoos written from the future - a future in which zoos as we know them no longer exist.