Visit to the zoo

 

You know how it's like. If you have young ones in the family there will also be a visit to the zoo. 

I don't like zoos. I know they do a lot of good work with preservation of rare species, education, breeding and so on. I find them boring because of the sheer number of exhibits one has to visit and admire. 

For example snakes - they sit there motionless in a glass tank in what looks like their natural habitat and you stop and gawp for a few minutes before moving on to the next snake of different size or colour. Then the next one, and the next, and so on. 

Same with insects; you look at the stick insect, then the centipede, the cockroach, the earwig and the next insect and so on. 

Another motionless creature is the penguin. They all stand there beside their pool looking at you looking at them. A friend of mine used to work in the penguin enclosure. Apparently, when an air-plane flies by very high in the sky, usually very slowly because of its height, all the penguins look up with their beaks in the air and they follow the trajectory of the plane as it flies slowly overhead. As they lean back ever more they fall over on their back. My friend used to come out and pick them up again.

Then there's the giraffe. What a silly looking animal with such long legs and a head up in the cloud with a superiority complex. I'm not sure what it's so proud about. A word of advice my friends. If you're ever in the zoo do not stand too close to the giraffe's barrier separating you from the animal. Should it relieve itself you won't smell so good afterwards as well as being wet.

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?

In one enclosure there was a solitary pig and the notice on the metal barrier "Gloucestershire Old Spots". It explained that it was a rare breed and the zoo were trying to get them to breed and save them from extinction through artificial insemination. I noticed that this lone pig had only three legs, so I asked his keeper who was there cleaning the cage whether the pig had been injured. "No," he replied, "when you have such a rare pig you don't eat him all at once!"

No trip to the zoo is complete without the obligatory visit to the gift shop. They had all kinds of toys. Cuddly bears and lions and tigers, as well as masks of various creatures, and model animals and this and that. 

I asked the assistant if she had a stuffed toy fly. She looked at me with the same air of puzzlement you'd get from a penguin. I explained that I had seen a fly on an apple earlier on in the birds' enclosure 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? How stupid can they get? Have you ever seen a hippopotamus buzzing around a half-eaten apple?