Wild vs. Captive

I just returned from a long weekend at Mount Rainier National Park here in Washington State, and while the weather was clear and very warm, I didn't get many wildlife shots like I had hoped. I managed to catch a glimpse of a fox carring a fresh kill into the underbrush, and I ran across a young bear on the trails above Sunrise, but most of the other animals were conspicuously absent from view. Since this trip was as much a vacation as it was a photo opportunity, I shrugged and chalked it up to luck, which is often more than 50% of a successful wildlife shoot.

On the way home, we discovered a stretch of Highway 7 was closed for some sort of road work, and the detour took us past the Northwest Trek Wildlife Park. Remarking that she had never been there, Chris agreed it might be kind of fun to stop in and take the tram ride around the park, since we were already in the neighborhood. Although the subsequent shots of the animals in the park will probably not win me any awards, it was still fun to see all the different Northwest species (all the large, photogenic ones, at any rate) all in one place.

The experience brought to mind an article written for Audubon Magazine by Ted Williams entitled Phony Wildlife Photography Gives a Warped View of Nature: The dark side of those wondrous wildlife photographs" </a>(March/April 2010) about the pros and cons of photographing captive animals and the questionable ethics of claiming to have shot them in the wild. There is a certain sense of dishonesty that you get when photographing animals at a zoo or game farm simply because you didn't have to stalk the animal ourself and plan your shot so you'd have the best chance of catching our target in just the right poses at just the right angle, with perfect light and environmental elements in just the right places. Especially in the case of game farms that allow you to rent animals specifically for photography, much of the work is eliminated by having a semi-tame animal actually hode a pose for you for as long as it takes for you to get your camera settings just right. Wild animals won't do that, and if you look at the shot I managed to get of the bear at Mount Rainier, it's pretty obvious he wasn't groomed just before I showed up with my camera, either. In fact, he shows signs of being roughed up a bit in his short life, which might add something to his character but doesn't necessarily make him more photogenic.
Captive animals present the professional photographer with two opposing things. On the one hand, they give the photographer access to species that many photographers go a lifetime without seeing in the wild, with time enough to get the “money shots” that actually sell to magazine and book publishers. In the purely economic sense, having a tame animal pose for you is good business, because for a fee, you are guaranteed the best shots you are capable of taking, and you don’t have to invest days or weeks (or sometimes years) trying to achieve the same shot chasing after wild animals. Add to that the benefit of comfort – you don’t have to freeze your butt off in some snowy wilderness for months living off beef jerky and powdered eggs while hoping against hope to capture a shot or two of a snow leopard, because all you have to do is wait for the keeper to bring the leopard out of its pen to hop up on the convenient rock or log in their studio, eat its treat given as reward for behaving completely unnaturally and stand there for several minutes looking bored. They are groomed and look cleaner and more picture-perfect than you will ever find in an actual forest, and almost come with a money-back-guarantee – if National Geographic doesn’t hire you on the spot after seeing these photos, then we’ve done something wrong.
On the other hand, these animals are indeed captive. They do not lead the lives nature intended for them, and while some operators of wild game farms make the effort to introduce enrichment activities for their animals, many do not. The animals often suffer from extreme ennui if not outright abuse.  And as for the photography, as Williams argues in his article, it feels fake. They look too good, and the relative ease of photographing them makes it seem to the viewer that they are more numerous or easier to find and photograph than they really are. When you see dozens of photos of tigers in multiple magazines, all looking healthy and magnificent, it almost seems as though you are seeing them everywhere in your daily life, and you get the mistaken impression that they are nearly ubiquitous in the world at large. The photo, and even the message of conservation that may be behind the photo, gets diluted by the frequency of viewing of similar images.
There once was a time when photographers and editors were actually fired for doctoring photos “too much,” by which they meant at all – even removing blades of grass that obstructed the view of the subject. If you didn’t get the shot in camera, then you didn’t get the shot, and creative editing was considered by many to be a form of fraud. Now we Photoshop everything. Yet in wildlife photography, there is still a sense of integrity that exists among the brethren, that if you can get the shot in camera, that’s always best, and if not, minimal tampering to improve the image is okay but you can’t add elements that weren’t there (adding a moon when it wasn’t really out that night, or wildflowers when they weren’t actually in bloom when you were there). If you must get a shot of an animal for an assignment and simply can’t fly to Siberia or Africa to go get it, it’s okay to get the shot from a game farm, but you had better be sure to declare it and not try to sell it as a true wildlife photo. A few recent cases illustrate this point, where photographers were disqualified from wild animal photo competitions when it came out that their shots were staged using tame animals. They were shots of animals that are normally wild, and the shots looked amazing, but the fakery that went into staging them was and is still unacceptable by the rest of us, who prefer to know or at least imagine that the shot is of a wild animal, behaving naturally rather than because of any conditioning or training by a keeper.
So here’s the deal I make with you. This past weekend, I got halfway decent shots of two wild animals, the bear and the fox, and I got a dozen others from Northwest Trek that were a little better than halfway decent, because they were contained in a 450 acre facility with nowhere else to go, so I was guaranteed to get shots of most of them. They weren’t posed for me, and were not tamed in any way, so they fall somewhere between true wildlife and game farm animals, in my opinion. In the meta data and file descriptions, any captive, non-domesticated animals that I photograph will be labeled “CAPTIVE,” to differentiate them from animals I actually ran across in my wanderings in the woods. I still prefer to find and photograph animals in the wild, but some of them I’m probably just never going to see, so I’m not above shooting at a zoo or even a game farm where I’ve rented an animal for an hour.  (I’ve chased after bighorn sheep every time I’ve visited Mount Rainier and have yet to see them in the wild, yet it took me all of twenty minutes to see a whole herd of them at Northwest Trek) I want to give you as many good shots of as many different subjects as I can, but I want to do so with full disclosure of where and how I got them. It's the only way I can keep myself out of trouble.
Mt. Rainier 2012 - Images by Michael Uyyek