I'm not sure which forum to post this in (and admittedly I've had a little eggnog,) but does anyone else fantasize about being able to go to a zoo bar? I've been to many bear bars and leather bars. Bars with nude dancers, bars with some questionable activities.
And I always dream of how nice it would be to have a zoo bar, just a quiet place where the bounce gives you the nod and you have a beer and pet some dogs.
A silly dream, I know, but I was wondering if anyone else fantasizes about a pro-zoo world like that?
Actually, such a scene is slowly starting to develop. We don't have a "zooey bar" going, yet, but even during the COVID-19 pandemic, local zoos have been getting into closer contact with each other and visiting each other in person more often. It takes you about a year to grow a local group of people to any reasonable size (we just got to two dozen recently), but once you have gotten started, new people start drifting in slowly.
The original "gay bars" did not actually start out as "gay bars," but they were just "bars that gay people were rumored to go to." They did not put out public advertisements saying, "Come to our illegal underground gay bar at 191 Wilson Street!" but it sort of spread in winks and nods. In fact, the Stonewall Inn did not become a gay bar until after the business was destroyed by a fire and nearly failed, and the Mafia took it over. The Mafia was not necessarily pro-gay, but they were willing to take any kind of money they could get without much regard for the morality by which they got it. Therefore, the Mafia used their little underground networks to build up interest among gay people, in the area, in having a place where they could slow-dance together (which was taboo for two men to do) in the wee hours of the morning. Not all of the bars that became gay-bars were Mafia-owned, but in general, what tended to lead to a bar getting turned into a gay bar was the fact that the place otherwise had a bad reputation (Stonewall was considered to be a firetrap, for instance) but was in reality a sort of cool underground sort of venue that had a hidden coolness and intellectualism to it that you wouldn't expect from the outside.
I would give you a much better example of the beginnings of the gay bar scene. The Dill Pickle Club in Chicago (it was in operation in the 1910's) was actually a Bohemian themed club, and they actually advertised themselves by posting what looked to the observer like deterrents and warnings. For instance, the sign directly outside said "Danger," and on the door, it said, "Step high, stoop low, and leave your dignity outside." Once you got inside, another sign said, "Elevate your mind to a lower level of thinking." They correctly figured that if someone was attracted to dangerous ideas and felt inspired by contradictory-sounding language, then that person was probably a cool and open-minded sort of person, so once you got inside, there was a lot of intellectualism going on. It was where a lot of the local champagne socialists and anarchists liked to meet and hang out. They once famously allowed the grandfather of the gay rights movement, the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, to give a lecture there regarding his views about homosexual people, although this and a few other incidences of Hirschfeld speaking publicly about his radical ideas led to Hirschfeld being literally run out of the country. It was not a gay bar, but it was a bar that welcomed the discussion of radical ideas, which actually included the anarchist views of the hobo doctor Ben Reitman. Ben Reitman was actually the Dill Pickle Club's press guru.
Chicago was, in a way, sort of the birthplace of gay rights. Let me back up, there: Chicago was literally the birthplace of the gay rights movement. The gay rights movement began when a homosexual Ashkenazi Jewish-German scholar was attending the World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago starting on May 1, 1893, at the height of the Decadent Movement with class tensions escalating everywhere and forbidden ideas being exchanged. Anarchy was spreading through the United States at the time, and the proto-hippie "hobo" movement, which was a movement whereby people chose to live as itinerant workers, was just starting to take off in the American northwest. While he was there, though, that young scholar could not help but to notice that his fellow homosexuals, in Chicago, were not really all that different from the ones that he had come to know in Berlin. This scholar, whose name was Magnus Hirschfeld, went on to become the founding father of the entire field of sexology research, and one of Magnus Hirschfeld's 21st Century successors, Professor J. Michael Bailey, is now likewise in the process of conducting some extremely important research on zoophiles.
Anyhow, the gay rights movement has deep historical roots, and it developed very slowly over the course of several generations. You can build up a movement, but you must not become frustrated with the slowness with which such a movement grows. You must not become dismayed that you cannot merely put out a clarion call for zoophiles to get together and open a zoo bar and have it prospering and bustling with political energy in less than a fortnight. If you are lucky, you can get the first humble and modest beginnings of such a movement launched within your lifetime, and you would work hard for even those.
You can probably find some pet-friendly bars around town, and if you and your local zooey friends go there regularly and find that you feel safe talking to each other a little more openly at those venues, then you can call it a zoo bar if you want to. What a bar is tends to be defined by its clientele. If you and some local zooey friends can develop an area at a local pet-friendly bar where zoophiles tend to meet and talk with each other, at first through innuendo and gestures and in time more boldly and overtly, then that would be a stepping-stone in history.
In fact, some of my local zooey friends actually met together at a local pub earlier this year, and I think that our waitress might have been a zoo. In any case, when one of my zooey friends' Kangal, which was a huge mastiff, got a little bit huggy with her, she said, "Come on, now, not in public." That was one meet-up at one local bar where pets were welcomed, and I think that political awareness has grown enough, among zoos, that they can tell when they might be among other zoos.
You can indeed get your wish, but you must be patient. You must prepared to work diligently, over the course of years, to get small and incremental rewards. If you get impatient or frustrated or impulsive, then you could blow the whole thing in a moment. Be diligent and patient. It takes time to build these kinds of movements, but if you learn how to honor the humble and unpretentious beginnings of it, then you can become a part of history.
Patience and diligence are the hardest skills for revolutionary thinkers to learn. Those skills come naturally to people that could never think like revolutionaries, and those skills are unextraordinary to people that could never think like revolutionaries: the inclination to be responsible and steady and practical tends to go hand-in-hand with conformist ideology, most of the time, and they co-occur because they stem from the same root. Nevertheless, something magical happens when the revolutionary learns also to think like an accountant or a scientist or a scholar or a doctor or a businessperson or an investor and learns how to grow a small investment of effort over time.
What I am doing here locally works in the same way as compound interest. I might only have a couple of dozen people near me that are willing to talk to each other online and only occasionally meet together semi-anonymously, but like compound interest, the investment will only keep on getting bigger as long as I do not disrupt or upset its primitive seeds. I must not become angry at my local friends for not being filled up, right now, with revolutionary fervor and a willingness to march on the capital with banners waving and drums beating, for we have only just begun to get to know each other. I really have no true entitlement to ask for such adventurous thinking. Patience is the key, and I must also be open-minded and accepting of what we eventually grow into, even if some of their ideals are very much unlike my own.
Instead of starting with a zoo bar, I would suggest to you that it would be more realistic to start with meeting one fellow zoophile at a local hangout, and just talk about anything. It doesn't even have to be about zoophilia. Just get to know each other. You don't need to have the banners of revolution flying every step of the way. A few hours of quiet conversation will do, for now. I think you would also find it substantially more satisfying, in the long-run, for as you get older, you will come to realize that the most powerful and transformative things you have ever done in your entire life have always started in the same way. When you have gotten older, you will find that the most solid and most permanent and most important transformations in your life have almost always started with such a seed.
But not quite what you meant 
