AROUND THE KITCHEN TABLE

Maureen Weber

The first time I ever went to a zoo, I was hardly bigger than the monkeys on display — and it’s only the monkeys I remember. It was in the days before anyone understood that you shouldn’t feed junk food to the animals and everyone was feeding popcorn to them through the openings in the cage. Someone put some popcorn into my hand and I held it out to a tiny monkey. She grabbed it quickly and scratched me in the process, producing painful little red welts on my hand. I wailed as only a four- or five-year-old can, but the poor creature looked at me with such remorse that I immediately felt more sorry for her than for me.

A number of years later we went to a larger urban zoo and it was the giraffes that made the most lasting impression. They were inside their high enclosure that day, incessantly licking the coating off the bars with their dark purple tongues, goopy saliva falling in thick threads 16 feet to the floor. I gazed up at these beautiful, dignified animals reduced to licking the bars that held them. Their long, long eyelashes were visible from down where I stood. I wondered if they dreamed of galloping across a plain in a land where it doesn’t snow.

I remembered the large cats too, probably because I love cats more than any other land animal. They languished in the shadows, and we wished they’d roar, or leap from their hideouts to excite us. Mostly they napped, rousing occasionally to yawn, the thrill of the hunt existing only in their genetic makeup.

Animals in captivity are frequently in the headlines: “Calgary Zoo staff shaken by deaths of dozens of stingrays”; “Siberian tiger kills its owner in Canada”; “Whale kills owner at Seaworld in front of audience.” The stingrays in Calgary were part of an interactive display where people could touch them. Where did people get the idea that they are entitled to “pet” stingrays?

At this year’s Academy Awards The Cove won the Oscar for best documentary feature. It brought to the world’s attention the tragic herding of dolphins and porpoises into a cove off the coast of Japan for the purposes of choosing the best and brightest for captivity, and slaughtering the rest to pass off as whale meat to an unsuspecting public. Dolphin exhibitions and “swim with dolphin” programs feed the insatiable desire of human beings to have extraordinary experiences usually available only to specialists like marine biologists who study them in the wild. It would be wonderful to swim with such a sensitive, intelligent creature, but at what cost? These programs are responsible for the endangerment of the dolphin population worldwide. Despite their “happy” appearance, dolphins live a short, miserable life in captivity because of stress, disease and pollution in their tanks. In the wild they might live 50 years.

Among many other biblical passages, we’ve taken Genesis too literally: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ ” Can’t go on an African safari? Just visit elephants at a zoo and overlook the fact that they suffer from social isolation, emotional starvation, death from foot infections and arthritis due to lack of exercise and standing for prolonged periods on hard surfaces.
Ron Rolheiser, OMI, frequently speaks about our desire to have everything, to engage in a restless pursuit to be fulfilled in every manner possible, to feel entitled to every experience money can buy: “Our generation has some wonderful emotional and moral qualities, but patience, chastity, contentment with the limits of circumstance, and the capacity to nobly live out tension are not our strengths.”

I should have remembered that when I went to a butterfly display at a local garden show recently. I imagined strolling among clouds of colourful butterflies, being privy to a steaming exotic paradise in which my spirits would be lifted on an otherwise grey March day.

What I found instead were butterflies in varying states of demise, some with tattered wings, some motionless where they’d crawled to die. I scooped up a delicate yellow insect from the cement floor and put her into a flowerbed lest she be stomped upon by an enthusiastic toddler who doesn’t know how long his legs are compared to the ground. The healthy ones were sensibly clinging to the netted ceiling to avoid the gleeful kids below. A few brave creatures fluttered about, alighting on some people’s shoulders, their fragile blue wings shimmering in the artificial light.

It was the hatching area that was most macabre, like something out of Silence of the Lambs. In a temperature controlled enclosure hung the cocoons of many different species. Some shook with the life inside ready to emerge. Some butterflies were struggling mightily to get out of their cocoons, some were resting from the intense effort, their wings still wrinkled, others were fanning their wings to dry and some were already starting to fly. Others died in the birthing process, their corpses still attached to the cocoon that was now their tomb.
Those who were “lucky” enough to make it would emerge to a concrete world where potted flowers and peeled bananas had been placed for their nourishment, a high net replaced blue sky and fluorescent lights took the place of a sun they would never see. All for our viewing pleasure.