The Human Enclosure

Alex Applebee and A. D. Masters

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What Would a Competent Zookeeper Say About the Human Habitat?

Alex Applebee and A. D. Masters

OMXUS Press, 2026

134 Aberdeen Street, Northbridge, WA 6003

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Author's Note

You build climbing walls for gorillas.

Every accredited zoo in the world -- the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria, the Zoo and Aquarium Association of Australasia -- mandates that captive primates be given opportunities to climb, brachiate, and traverse three-dimensional space. Ropes. Logs. Platforms at varying heights. Textured surfaces. Vertical complexity. This is not a luxury or an enrichment bonus. It is a regulatory requirement. A zoo that housed gorillas on flat concrete with nothing to climb would lose its accreditation. It would be in the newspapers. People would be outraged.

Now walk into any office building, any school, any train station, any hospital, any apartment block. Find the climbing wall. Find the monkey bars. Find a single structure in the adult built environment that invites a primate body to do what primate bodies have done for sixty million years.

You will not find one. The adult world has chairs.

This thesis began with a question that should have been asked decades ago: if we applied the same welfare assessment frameworks we use for captive elephants, wolves, and great apes to the environments where most humans spend their lives, what score would we get?

The answer is 3.4 out of 10. The average zoo scores 6.4.

We treat gorillas better than we treat ourselves.

Goal 11 (physical infrastructure) (physical infrastructure) of the OMXUS project states: "Monkey bars at every bus stop. Climbing walls on all stairwells." It sounds like a joke until you realize that every accredited zoo already does this for every other primate species on th