5109/18029
An afternoon in a cold and slightly wet London Zoo with friends and their babies. It was a lot of fun though with Phoebe now at the age where she is starting to get more out of trips like this - though to be fair the bits she enjoyed most were jumping in puddles and finding fun stuff to climb on. Even when I told her that we had puddles at home for free, so I’d prefer her to look at the stuff we’d paid twenty-odd quid each to see (mind you, she had got in for free, so no harm). But the smaller babies were not very impressed with the actual animals, because as was rightly pointed out, they haven’t seen enough cows or sheep in their life to know that a tiger is unusual or impressive. Phoebe was starting to understand that some creatures are rarer than others in the UK - although she was also learning how she was supposed to respond to things. In the Aquarium she heard us saying “Wow” and then said “Wow” at every single tank.
And Phoebe was impressed with the tigers too, more than with the lions (though they were at more of a distance). I’d almost forgotten that four years ago my wife and I had come here to get a behind the scenes tour and had fed the tigers (essentially because my generosity in doing a five minute set at a gig with some lesser known comics had PAID for this enclosure).
So even though I had been 20cm away from a tiger through bars, I was still impressed to be just a sheet of glass away. There was an adult tiger and two cubs and they were being fed as we arrived at the enclosure. Maybe because I wasn’t terrified about having my fingers ripped off I was almost more impressed by them this time.
The animals seemed to have a fair amount of room in general. I understand why people think zoos are cruel, but obviously they also do a lot of work in conservation and raising awareness of extinction threats and just getting kids interested enough in animals that some of them might want to help them. It was only when we went to the gorilla enclosure that it started to feel more like a prison. A big gorilla sat in his enclosure, looking so still that I wasn’t sure it was a real gorilla. Even when it moved I wondered if it was a man in a bad suit (which might be a way to keep zoos going, without animal cruelty and give employment to loads of actors), but he as real. He sat staring at us, impassively and I couldn’t work out if he felt sad or angry. I was projecting of course, but this was as close to locking up a person for the entertainment of others as you could get. Just a couple of different chromosomes and he could be out walking round the zoo like us. I know from personal experience that the zoo is run by people who care passionately about the animals and do everything they can to give them the best life possible and maybe I’ve just watched too much Planet of the Apes. But that still and possibly fuming gorilla was the only animal that made me feel slightly sad. He was biding his time, waiting for the day he could rise up over his human overlords and make them his slaves and then bury the Statue of Liberty in some sand. And when the apes do rise up, they will do tours of the zoo where humans are now in every cage and have displays explaining how sick we were, pointing out the awful hypocrisy of claiming to love animals while keeping them imprisoned and then slaughtering other creatures and serving them up for people to eat in the restaurant. No one said “Wow” as we ate fish and chips for our lunch.
But in spite of the madness that we accept as normality, or maybe partly because of it, we had a great day. Though my research suggests that a tourist attraction that was just a load of puddles might be equally successful from a toddler’s point of view. And not leave you questioning (but continuing to accept) the moral values of Western Civilisation. Also the toys in the gift shop would be shit.
