Animals in the zoo
wild times with children can be bittersweet too ...
There’s nothing like taking your own little animals to the zoo. It raises so many intriguing questions. For instance, on our most recent zoo visit, my kids wanted to know why I wouldn’t buy them ice-creams. At 9 o’clock in the morning.
This in turn got me wondering why I was suddenly being mauled by howler monkeys. Only to learn they weren’t actually howler monkeys. They were my kids, demanding ice-creams.
To distract the little beasts, I posed a new question: Hey, if you were an animal in the zoo, which one would you be? And please, anything but howler monkeys.
The kids went for kangaroos, so they could jump the counter and scoff ice-creams.
I told the kids maybe life as a polar bear wouldn’t be half bad, but they reckoned they’d seen a polar bear in a zoo spinning in sad little circles. I told them those were probably Arctic circles. They weren’t buying it.
The most promising candidates on our shape-shifting wish list were clearly the marmosets, monkeys and seals. Which begged another question: was it wrong that we only wanted to be cheery-looking animals?
It certainly felt a bit wrong as we filed quickly past the forlorn looking creatures, on a beeline for the more playful options. With all eyes on the cavorting penguins we slowed only briefly, heads bowed, for the tigers. Those big cats looked to have given up cavorting a long time ago. They looked like they’d been to hell and back and could no longer be bothered doing anything more than sprawl, yawn and stare glassily. It was unsettling. And not just because it could have been a scene straight out of our living room at the end of a particularly rough week. Without the tigers, obviously. And with pizza boxes.
Our little anthropomorphic exercise only added to the sense that a zoo is as much about us humans it is about the resident animals. Good, bad or ugly, the way we cage animals says a lot about us. It's a hall of mirrors. With fur, fins and feathers thrown in.
Having a walled-in space in which to share a moment of mutual beingness with our fellow creatures may or may not be good for those creatures, but it does something for us. We see ourselves, and more, through other species. Be they happy, playful, angry, sleepy, or cowering in a cornering wishing the world away.
One glance at a panda with those big dark rings around his eyes and I’m nodding in solidarity. I've seen that face staring back at me in the bathroom mirror many times.
Meanwhile, the kids were wondering about life as an undeniably eye-catching cassowary. But it was decided that wasn’t really us. It's not really anybody, as far we could tell. Except maybe the victim of a 1980s fashion show disaster.
Far more fetching was the freckled duck. It looked right at home. And no wonder, since, out in the wild, duck shooters have a nasty habit of blasting away at this rarest of rare waterfowl, despite its protected species status. So, life with freckles isn’t any easier than I remember it from school.
The Madagascar lemur seemed a safer bet. Though I had to inform the kids that any attempt to swirl their imaginary stripy tails and sing “I like to move it, move it” was bound to be a breach of animated movie franchise copyright. How the real Madagascar lemurs haven’t been hit with a writ yet is anyone’s guess.
The gnu appeared an inspired choice, but I figured you’d soon get sick of all the other animals making bad puns from your name.
Then there were the meerkats. So perky, so playful. A perfect choice, you might think. We certainly did, until we noticed a few stumpy tails and were told of the meerkats’ tendency to chew their tails off when stressed. This had me thinking we humans would still have tails, if we hadn’t gnawed them off in our darker moments. Not that I dwelled on it. It was almost 10 o’clock. Time for ice-cream.
First published in The Big Issue.