At the Zoo

Why is it that people with children like to go to the zoo over and again? What's so fun about going to the zoo? They're such a waste of time and money.

I think zoos should only have five animals. The rest are a total unnecessary waste.

Children go to zoos to see the lion, the tiger, the elephant, the giraffe and of course the monkeys. The rest are not important.

Who really cares about going to the zoo and seeing a tortoise? Or a frog? Or snakes?

"Oh ... here is a snake. Let's stop and watch him not moving for at least ten minutes!" They are all not moving. They are most probably asleep or dead with boredom at being in a glass tank under such a hot light.

Would you go to the zoo to watch an earwig or a centipede?

Which reminds me. Did you know that if a centipede is attacked it detaches some of its legs and throws them at his attacker? That way the attacker stops to eat the leg and the centipede runs away and hides.

It's true, I tell you. I read it in a book called the Legless Centipede which I am currently writing. The book will contain 100 pages with perforations near the spine. That way, as the book is read the pages will tear off and you'll be left with just the cover. Clever, don't you think? There will be a version with edible paper so you can eat the pages as you tear them off the book."Feed the Mind AND the Stomach" is my new motto!

Back to the zoo ... of course, there is the interminable collection of animals who look very much the same but have different names. There's the reindeer, the white tailed deer, the elk, the moose, the fallow deer, the Siberian roe deer, the piebald deer, the Père David's deer and the I don't care what type of deer you are deer. You are all boring me to death!

And it's the same for other animals. The zebra for example is just a horse painted in black and white lines. What's so clever about that? The bison and the buffalo are just cows like any other cow or ox but with a fancy name to earn them a place in the zoo.

And don't tell me about the interminable collection of birds of every size, colour and shape? Do I really care about the difference between one hawk and another, or one owl and another, or one parrot and another? Do children really care?

We stood there for what seemed years watching some feathered creatures in various cages. I forgot, nor cared, what they were called; but I remember they ate fruit because on the ground and stuck to various branches in the cage were pieces of apples which the keepers put there.

The cages had various labels naming the different birds, where they originate from, and whether they were extinct or not. A misnomer if there ever was one. Extinct means they don't exist. Since these birds were here in the cage wasting my time and keeping me from a well-earned Guinness proves the fact that they are not extinct. YET!!!

Personally, the only birds I care for are the ones I find at my favourite Kentucky Fried restaurant. I wonder why they don't serve Kentucky Fried parrot, or hawk or owl? There's plenty of scope for diversifying in that restaurant. Like Kentucky Fried ostrich or rabbit. Although they would need bigger fryers for the elephants!

That asides, I noticed that on some of the apples were a few flies enjoying the nectar of the fruit. I called one of the zoo keepers and asked him which kind of flies these were. He looked puzzled and said "I don't know; they're just flies!" I complained that since all the birds had been named by their individual labels why are there not any labels on the cage explaining more about the flies and their life cycle?

Before we left this tedious collection of creatures I don't care much about, we just had to visit the souvenir shop. Every trip to the zoo must end with a visit to the souvenir shop. It's traditional and another opportunity to waste your hard-earned cash on a lot of things you really don't need. Of course the children love the stuffed toy animals. What's better than a stuffed toy lion? Or a giraffe perhaps?

I asked the shop attendant whether she had a stuffed toy fly. She looked at me with the same air of puzzlement as the bird keeper earlier on. I explained that I had seen a fly on an apple earlier on and I would like as a souvenir of my visit to the zoo to purchase a stuffed toy fly. She asked the manageress who assured me that there is not much demand for such toys and would a toy hippopotamus do instead?

Anyway, we eventually left the zoo, with the children so tired they slept in the car cuddling their toy animals and me counting how much money we had spent. This is probably the fifth time at least we have visited different zoos during the holidays, and they are all the same. Not much fun really!