Here's my take on that old Simon and Garfunkel song. I don't think animals are very happy unless you give them the stuff they like to do. That stuff is hard wired, at least a great deal of it. The big cats are supposed to hunt. There are many other examples of that. I imagine most of the animals are disgruntled.
At The Zoo
Peering through steel bars,
grasping hold, shaking them with
sweaty hands, gave up,
no way out of here.
I'm all twisted up with it.
If my face looks strange
and my fur all wild
I suggest you go look at
someone else, okay?
March 24, 2009 12:14 PM
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I have a hard time with zoos because I find myself imagining how the animals must feel. You have expressed it well.
ReplyDeleteI don't want to sound too much of a child but I simply can not go to zoos. A great sadness takes me. We're pigs - us - the ones who've made this world, the one the houses them.
ReplyDeletexo
erin
Karen, if I have expressed it well then you have imagined it well. The Simon and Garfunkel song openly pasted human forms on the animals. I am not the only one who imagines our society as a zoo.
ReplyDeleteYes, Erin, there has been a new word coined for this kind of sentiment too, or rather for what you see when you look at the rest of us, the ones who see nothing wrong here. Michael Pollan has written a couple books about it and he uses this term. This is about food and how we get food. Speciesist. It means thinking we are above judgement regarding how we treat the others on the planet, the four footeds and the feathered ones, the sentient ones. That would include many if not most zoos.