At the time of Blind Man's Zoo being released, the members of 10,000 Maniacs were American singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant, keyboardist Dennis Drew, bassist Steve Gustafson, guitarist Rob Buck, and drummer Jerry Augustyniak.

The band's first few releases—the Human Conflict Number Five EP (1982) and Secrets of the I Ching LP (1983), issued under their own record label Christian Burial Music—had lacked commercial success.

[2] Numerous songs on Blind Man's Zoo were inspired by social issues and contemporaneous events, despite Merchant's limited knowledge of politics.

[1] Music critic Anthony DeCurtis considered it "a starkly pessimistic statement" in contrast to the band's usual "greatest professional optimism".

[1][3] The fourth track, "Trouble Me", is a ballad featuring music composed by Dennis Drew and lyrics by Merchant in dedication to her father, who was hospitalized at the time of the writing.

[1][4] The eighth track, "Dust Bowl", is about a plighted mother financially struggling to raise her children in an impoverished manufacturing town.

[4] The final track, "Jubilee", is a "semi[-]operatic" song about religious fanaticism involving a racist who burns down a dance hall, in which he had witnessed "a black girl and a white boy kissing shamelessly".

The Chicago Tribune reviewer Greg Kot praised the album for "Merchant's powerful lyricism" on "the global theme of betrayal".

[19] Rolling Stone reviewer David Browne called the album 10,000 Maniacs's "best record", praising the band as "more focused" and "Buck's darting guitars [as] more powerful than ever".

[4] CD Review's Larry Canale criticized Merchant's "unintelligible" vocals but praised her "novelettes and the band's sprightly, sometimes edgy melodies".

[18] The staff of People praised the music of the album, especially Buck's guitar performance, but found it "monotonous" and further called "Jubilee" "a major downer".

[22] In retrospective reviews, AllMusic's Chris Woodstra considered the album inferior to its predecessor In My Tribe and wrote that despite "all of its earnestness and good-intentioned teachings, Blind Man's Zoo ultimately fails in its heavy-handed and generally uninteresting approach".