Ramblings

Lowpro and I took a run through the zoo the other day, which was a good way for us to build our physical endurance. We now have strong legs, and good healthy lungs.

Some people dislike zoos.  They claim that the captive animals are unhappy, that zoos are cruel and inhumane.  I don’t think those people have spent much time outdoors the way all animals do:  naked and covered in biting insects, starving and drinking dirty water, cold and miserable, running away from forest fires only to be shot by hunters while watching their babies get eaten by predators.  It’s a tough and unsympathetic world out there.  Sometimes it’s better to spend your life behind a thick layer of protective glass, begging for and eating the scraps you’re given.

The zoo I went to in Korea might be worse than the wild.  Buried in an amusement park, it was smelly and depressing.  I walked in and saw my first exhibit:  turtles covered in loose change.  I still don’t know why, but everyone entering the zoo threw whatever coins they had in their pockets onto the turtles.  The turtles seemed pretty irritated about the whole situation.  They longed to be on a nice piece of floating debris in a bog.

A nursery of raccoon dogs was packed into a small cage near the front.  I’d never seen a raccoon dog before.  At first I thought maybe the sign was mislabeled, a very common occurrence in Asia, but after looking closer I began to think that the sign was probably accurate.  They really did look like a mix between a raccoon and a dog.  I think those raccoon dogs lucky enough not to live in the zoo are usually made into fur coats in China.  Their close proximity to one another in the cage had made them bitchy and snarly with each other.  People were throwing cheese and peanut butter coated crackers into the cage, and they would fight each other for the food.  The victor would run to the back of the cage and wash each cracker in a trough of water before eating it.

Walking down the hallway I saw the skinniest bear I’d ever seen.  Not that I’ve seen many bears, but this guy was really skinny.  I don’t think he’d been fed in awhile; his ribs were sticking out all over the place.  I mean, this bear was really skinny.  He probably would have eaten a whole bison if given the opportunity.

It seemed like every elementary school in Korea was visiting the zoo that day, and little kids less than four feet tall were running around everywhere, throwing coins and candy at all of the animals for them to eat.  A trainer came out with a baby orangutan dressed in a hanbok with a big, pink bow in the front.  The baby was tiny and adorable.  I wanted to adopt him and let him wear diapers all over my house.  Really, he should have been riding on the back of his mother in a tree eating branches, but instead he was being forced to wear a dress and be paraded around a bunch of 8-year-old kids.  That poor baby orangutan.

The trainer handed him off to the nearest group of children to hold, and the ensuing frenzy was like sharks to a fresh bucket of chum dropped in the ocean.  Every kid within reach grabbed a piece of the orangutan and pulled.  He was being drawn and quartered by a bunch of pre-adolescents.  How awful.  Baby orangutans that are carried off and eaten alive by eagles in Sumatra probably don’t experience so much terror.  The baby reached an arm out and back to the trainer, his eyes wide with fear.  All he probably wanted was his mother and a banana or a mango or a nest of ants or whatever it is that orangutans normally eat.  The trainer lit a cigarette and leaned against a wall.  He took a long, slow and fulfilling drag.

I kept walking.  I wouldn’t be able to help that baby orangutan.  There was better chance of me reaching into my backpack and producing a moose carcass for that skinny-ass bear.  I passed by an angry chimpanzee furiously beating on the glass panel of his room.  He was a like a psychotic mental patient who had just worked his way out of a straight jacket.  I thought for a minute that the glass would break and he would choke me to death in front of an entire class of Korean third graders.  I ran away down the hall.

The primate exhibit continued with lazy gibbons relaxing on wooden shelves.  I walked into the room and they immediately swung to the wall of the cage and stuck their arms through the bars.  Those arms must have been at least twelve feet long.  I was nearly slapped in the face.  The guy next to me pulled a choco-pie out of his bag, unwrapped it, and dropped it into the open palm of the waiting gibbon.  He ate it unenthusiastically without any pleasure at all.  I’m sure he would have traded all the choco-pies in the world for a decent plate of twigs and shoots.

In the last room an elephant was kept in a small concrete area with nothing to keep her company except a six-foot long fluorescent light.  She had probably been put in there as a baby and spent her entire life in that room.  There was no way she would ever walk out of there alive, the door was clearly too small for a full-grown elephant to exit.  She would need to be chopped apart and hauled out piece by piece when she finally died, or they could just let that starving bear eat it.

Before leaving I visited the aquarium, which was desperately in need of a couple of hundred gallons of water.  The fish inside swam with a noticeable tilt, there not being enough water for them to swim fully upright.  They should have just been put out of their misery and fed to the bear.

I walked back outside to the amusement park and rode on roller-coasters for the rest of the day. 

That zoo in Korea wasn’t very good.  I give it a score of 65 out of 100,000.  The zoo in DC isn’t too bad.  I give it a score of 80,123 out of 100,000.