Back to the zoo for a minute...

It was pretty cool. I’ve been to some great zoos before, and this ranks up there. It’s probably the first ‘real’ zoo Jacob has been to, but I’ve been to quite a bit. In addition to the regular amount of zoos every American goes to growing up, I had to go to a lot for some of my college courses back when I was going to be an Ethologist. I still don’t know how I feel about them. I mean, I know that these are animals who need the place to live, and that they are treated really well (if we‘re talking top-notch zoos), but I still can’t help feeling like an ignorant human gawking at the poor nature deprived animals, even though our $20 parking fee is going toward making their homes as nice as they can be. The circus however, you’ll never catch me there. As long as I can be respectful of the animals and use our time at the zoo as a learning opportunity for Jacob, and to teach him to be respectful of the animals then I guess I can rationalize it.

What this lady here is doing, that pretty much is
the coolest thing ever in my book, and what I
consider my dream job. Yes, Jane Goodall
is my idol.

Speaking of being respectful, let’s talk for a moment about all the people I wanted to kick in the head at the zoo. The person who first irritated me enough to send the auto-response transmitters to my brain, initiating ‘kick-in-the-head’ mode was the lady who wobbled, yes wobbled, up to the Chimpanzee enclosure and through her broken teeth cooed to her young child, “Look at the monkey! It’s a monkey!! Look at the funny monkey!” Way high up on my pet-peeve list is people who call chimps, monkeys. I had to leave before I made a scene. I just hope those chimps were over there on the other side cracking jokes at all the ignorant humans.

Then there was another back-woods group hanging out by the ducks and pelicans. This prize of a family included a wife-beater-donning, teenage loser who was feeding the pelicans mass amounts of cheese puffs because “uh-huh, uh-huh, ga-faw, it’s funny to see them there bir-dies open them mouths and choke on ma cheesy doodlers! C’mere bir-dies so I can try ‘an git ‘em in yer gully from up here on this here deck.” Did I get that right? I’m not so versed in Hick. Well anyway…I was there, circling around with my palms faced to the sky in question, “Shouldn’t there be someone who works here telling those IDIOTS that they can’t feed the animals, especially not cheese puffs?!” I was saying this loud enough so the idiots in question could hear me and it was all Zach could do to pull me and my fight face outta there before somebody got dumped in the river. If you’re one of my flickr contacts you can see the kid in action because he *got into* one of my pictures.

There were two different groups of teenage boys who were committing slightly milder, yet still as offensive, acts towards the animals. The first group of four, armed with their camera phones, had a pea hen (I can’t figure out if she was supposed to be out of the marked off area) cornered against a building and were taking turns bending down getting their pictures snapped face-to-face with the poor bird. The only reason I didn’t intervene was because I kept waiting for her feathers to get as ruffled as mine so she would peck out one of their eyes. That, I wanted a picture of!

The last group of boys, lacking in cell phones, were forced to revert to the primeval act of barking and slapping their forearms together in front of their chests, actually believing this would illicit a response from the sea lions they were gawking at. All it really did though, was make them look like a bunch of --- erg ---I really want to use a totally un-PC word, but I won’t. I am better than that.

If you’ve ever spoken to me in real life, maybe you’ve heard me say “Non-human animals.” This is how I refer to all animals which are not human. I do this because of the attitude that some ignorant people have that we humans are above all the other animals. I want to encourage the idea that the Earth and all its flora and fauna were not put here for humans to dominate over, and that we are, infact, just another type of animal, and I use my choice of language to convey that idea. In writing though, it looks a little awkward, so all you get on the pages are ‘animals‘.

Now you tell me who, on these pages, were the ‘animals’ at the zoo.