The New Zoo Review

I remember taking an anthropology class as an underclassman and learning a very startling fact. You know when animals pace from one end of their cage to the next at the zoo? Well, that's actually a sign that the animal is going insane. Read Rilke's Panther, if you must for reasons why, but I have another suggestion: flagrant and absolute boredom. You put a polar bear, used to having a 100 mile radius hunting grounds in a cage with a 100 foot diameter, well...he's likely to feel like you would feel if we shoved you in a cage to live out the rest of your life.

Now, I'm no animal rights activist (thank God!). Zoos are zoos. They perform a service to both people and to animals. You see the lemurs and you find out that they are being hunted to extinction and you think to yourself, 'how could anyone hunt lemurs to extinction.' You are appalled, you become concerned, next thing you know, pissed off people are taking action to make sure that lemurs are no longer hunted to extinction. Also, children seem to like animals, you don't want your children trying to pet cheetahs in the wild, so you take them to the zoo and you say, "look, a cheetah." Yes, I like zoos.

But it still gets me, those bored animals going insane because they have nothing to do. They may be performing a service for their species, but let's face it, their lives are less than admirable.

So, some zoos have decided to give animals things to do. The point of this is, of course, to increase attendance. People like to see cheetahs chasing shit rather than lounging around a concrete "habitat," but let's put our cyinisism on hold for a moment. The cheetahs are probably happier too, right? I mean, they're cheetahs, they're probably happier chasing crap around rather than sitting inside their aquarium taking one for the species.

Well, enter the animal rights activists. Evidentally, this practice of putting live fish in the tank with the sea otters, and making the cheetah chase a paper mache rabbit filled with ground beef at 60 mph has the animal rights activists up in arms, and who is their target? Well, of course, their age old nemesis: the zoo keeper, the guy who's trying to raise public awareness about animals so that entire species doesn't go the way of the do-do.

Let me try this another way, there are animal rights activists, right now, attempting to take excitement away from the zoo animals. The animal rights activist WANT the animals to be bored to the point of insanity. Hmmm....

Forget teen violence and low test scores, who do you blame for this shit?

Changeling

I've thought of something and I thought I'd just share it with you all. My wife keeps having strange dreams about our cat and the baby, in which the cat takes over various roles that the baby will soon be here to perform. She tells this to her friend, and her friend tells her about dreams that she's had wherein she gave birth to kittens. My wife tells our pastor about this and he tells us that his wife would lactate at the sound of the cat because her maternal instinct had kicked in toward the pet.

Do all women have this?

Now, let's assume that only a significant number of women have this, that part of the maternal instinct kicking in is that it seizes on pets as well as humans, creating dreams, and things like that. This probably means very little to us, given that we don't really think dreams mean much at all, but can you imagine what this must have meant back in the middle ages. Women would have dreams that their babies were replaced by pets, and then the baby would come and the pet, who now doesn't get enough attention, would run away. What does it mean? One day you're having dreams about the pet replacing the baby, and the next day, you have a baby and no pet. Well clearly, the baby has been replaced by the pet because the pet wasn't really an animal at all; the pet was a changeling. Yes, but where did the baby go. Ah yes, the changelings have taken the baby away.

Wouldn't it be weird if that's how the legend actually started!