Let's Go to the Zoo!

          The Zoo has always been a near sacred place for me as far back as I can remember. When I was little I had a host of medical problems, like asthma and food allergies.  Many of these are still with me now but everything is harder for a little kid old.  My parents were just discovering the full extent of my allergies, taking me to see an allergy specialist in Philadelphia two and a half hours away.  I don’t remember going to this allergist or calling him Ole Doc Scovern with jocular familiarity.  I don’t remember any of this because it wasn’t a whole lot of fun.  I’ve had allergy tests since, getting a section of your arm pricked with little samples of substances, food, pollens, trees, molds.  If nothing happens, you aren’t allergic to them, but if a big hive wells up, you are. It stings and makes you pretty queasy. Back then, there were a lot of hives. I'm glad I don't remember.

     My reward for persevering like a trooper was going to the zoo afterward (just as McDonalds became the reward for sitting through soccer practice in later years.)   I don’t remember anything about the allergist or his office,  but I do have a startlingly clear memory of one of the zoo trips when I was around five.  I’m in the reptile house with its bright red carpet.  I’m standing in front of a glass habitat, looking at a white albino crocodile warming himself on a boulder.  His bright pink eye is watching me as I’m throwing up on that carpet, throwing up the milk trial they gave me earlier at the doctor's office.  It sounds pretty bad yes, but the thing is, I bet that my memory held onto it not because throwing up in public is awful, but because that albino crocodile was pretty awesome.

     I was into animals when other kids were going through trucks, trains, and construction vehicles with smiley faces tacked onto them.  Besides a deviation into the kickass world of dinosaurs, and much later Star Wars, animals were what it was all about.  I collected plastic animal figures and waited for my animal fact files to be sent through the mail five at a time.  I debated impossible animal fights match-ups from the backseat, something my Mom reminds me of to this day. "If a tiger and a shark fought, who would win?"  It would obviously depend on where they fought.  Tiger's are the only big cats that like water, but c'mon…it's a shark.  Luckily for them both, this would probably never come to pass.  I remember even being disappointed that we didn't live in Asia or Africa, one of those places overflowing with exotic animals. No, we lived in Pennsylvania, squirrels and deer running amok.  The Zoo brought them to me.

     Portions of my life’s story so far can be told through trips to the zoo.  My senior year of high school I was in New York with my parents.  We had the afternoon to kill and anything in the whole big city to do.  "When you were little this would have been easy," my Mom said, "I would have just taken you to the zoo." I hadn't been to the city more than a few times, couldn't remember seeing the Statue of Liberty or any of those famous landmarks.  I was eighteen then, but who was I kidding, of course I still wanted to go to the zoo!  I had to be dragged away from playing tag with a seal at the Pittsburgh Zoo after visiting my sister there in college.  I would have run back and forth along his tank all afternoon.  

          

        Years later, alone for an afternoon in Madrid, I braved three subway transfers in Spanish to go to their zoo.  I watched Spanish families throw food scraps to the sixty strong tribe of ferocious baboons who went wild, biting, clawing, screaming at each other for bits of cookie, reinforcing laws of brute force dominance.   An hour away from Ithaca was the dinky little Syracuse zoo, a trip Erica and I made from early on countless times to see the spectacled bears, the tiny Duiker deer, the pile of ring-tailed lemurs, and the not-to-be-fucked-with Mandrill, whose escape would certainly spell the doom of all upstate New York.  On an impromptu weekend trip to Chicago, me and friends watched laughing as the Takin (an extremely slow-witted, golden goat-antelope of the Himalayas pictured above) snargled its own puddle of piss on a hot afternoon.  On our winter vacation to Panama, Erica and I still ended up at the zoo just outside the capitol.  Kind of a sorry place like all Developing World Zoos (also known as animal prisons), but got up close to their national symbol the Harpy Eagle (which could tear up our Bald Eagle if it ever came to that, and in reality often eats monkeys.) 

             Here in Seattle, the Woodland Park Zoo is half a mile from our apartment.  It's  on the small side, but pretty good as zoos go.  It has all the classics everyone wants to see, elephants, big cats, gorillas, along with a pretty stellar collection of tropical birds from Asia and South America.  Erica's parents know us well, and a membership to this zoo is a gift well used many, many times over.  Zoos normally cost twenty bucks or more and you feel obligated to spend four hours to see every last animal and get every penny's worth of edjutainment.  Here we go even if we only have twenty minutes to spare.  It's nice to go look into the morose, thoughtful eyes of an orangutan now and again or watch toucans rubbing their plastic-looking bills against the side of a branch inside the steamy Jungle House.

     As an old animal nerd, it really bugs me when parents allow their kids to learn things wrong.  The Woodland Park Zoo has no hyenas, the spindly legged, big eared guys running around across rom the lions are NOT hyenas, they are African Wild Dogs, and they're super cool.  "Those are hyenas honey," I hear one Mom say to her kids.  There's a sign a few feet away from her that clearly says what they are.  I hope they come back when the kids learn how to read and maybe they'll correct her.  

     "Look! Lions, like Alex, he sings and dances!" a Dad says to his little son.  I realize he's talking about the Lion from Madagascar, voice acting a la Ben Stiller.  

     "No Dad," the kid says oh so seriously, "Lions don't dance."  Yeah kid, don't take that animated dumbing-down of the animal kingdom.  Maybe lions sing, but they certainly don't dance. 

     Kids are pretty hilarious however, and sometime's the things they mis-understand are too unique to be corrected.  On passing a big wooden sign for the new Meerkat exhibit, a child, overtaken with unbridled excitement yells to his mom, "Look Mom, Murk Rats!"  She doesn't quite laugh, but she certainly smiles. "Yeah, let's go see the murk rats."  Murky rats killed half of Europe with the plague, while Meerkats are extremely adorable and are the Woodland Park Zoo's new cash cow.  Nothing brings in the dollars like Timon…Pumba less so.  

     When I'm walking through this zoo, especially when I'm here by myself, my path inevitably leads to the Northern Trail area, and its two massive brown bears. I'm sitting in the enclosed space down by the bear's watering hole.  They're looking restless, they know food is coming. All the animals have their feeding schedules memorized.  A thick plate of glass protects me but their hulking presence still gives off a tangible aura of tension.  They lumber down onto boulders by the water filled with small salmon.  One of them catches my eye for a few moments, making me wonder if they ever forget they are constantly being watched by creatures who would normally flee from them in terror.  The bear looks away from me, maybe I was imagining the contact completely.  A net filled with roots, tubers, and meat scraps is lowered from above to the feet of the waiting bear.  The two bears eat as much as they want before lumbering back up the hill.  Fifteen or so crows fly in as the bears depart, picking at what the bears didn't want.  They scatter again as the larger of the two bears makes another pass of the area for no reason I can tell, besides to clear out the noisy crows. Their enclosure, habitat, or whatever the official zoo term is now, is big but not quite big enough, like at every zoo, even the best of them.  How can a few thousand square feet compare to the supreme vastness of places like Alaska, Yukon, or Nunavuut? 

           But I've always felt more positive than negative about zoos.  They can be real depressing it's true, seeing wild animals pacing around in such a regular pattern that all the grass dies in their circular route, animals whose range in their natural habitat can be eighty square miles. The catch however is that the vastnesses of Alaska, Canada, and Russia are not infinite, they're forever shrinking.  Wild animals are continually pushed into tiny corners, captured to be sold as pets, and butchered for fake medicines (thanks China).  Zoos, even if they curtail an animal's natural lifestyle, provide refuge from the worst humans can do, and make them accessible to the rest of us.  As their wilderness diminishes, its harder and harder to see them where they belong, and getting to Siberia, Sumatra or the Serengeti is beyond most people's budget.  For the price of a zoo ticket, they are available to everyone.  Zoo-goers are also funding the continued welfare of the animals.  It's a small step in the right direction.  Zoos serve as a minor apology to the natural balance we've fucked up so indiscriminately and without a look back.  

      I didn't become a six year old well-spring of random animal facts by seeing them in their natural habitat, it was my zoo trips.  Watching Jack Hannah and shows on National Geographic is great, but it's not the same as looking up at a real-life giraffe towering over you, grabbing leaves with its giant purple tongue.  I want kids everywhere to go to the zoo and love it like I did, to realize that a bulldozer or a monster-truck could never, EVER be cooler than a friggin Grizzly Bear.