How the French Zoo Was So Dire It Taught Me to Feel Sympathetic Towards Animals I'd Normally Despise
As it turns out, the Montpellier Zoo is one of the more depressing places at which one could hope to pass a few hours during an idle afternoon, and today, I had the great pleasure of spending my hangover there. To be fair, I don't recall having been to a zoo in at least a decade (and isn't it scary how I'm starting to reference life events in terms of DECADES? When I started this blog I could scarcely have done that...). So, it's possible that all zoos are rather bleak wastelands which make their patrons face the futility of their collective existence, while making them feel guilty about whatever small part they may play in the perpetuation of this torture, but that I had just forgotten about it. I mean, I guess that there is something fundamentally sinister about lining up to see an animal in a cage... But, actually, no. THIS zoo has to be worse than normal zoos. It was a veritable labyrinth composed of badly sign-posted, rocky, hilly, winding paths, in which the animals are nearly impossible to find. And, if you do happen to find any animals, they are either (1) somehow sickly or deformed, (2) one of a seemingly infinite variety of subtley different, yet entirely uninteresting species of goat, or (3) housed in the most desolate and compact of wire-fenced cages. This bear, for example, was a zoo highlight, and it spent the five minutes I observed it ramming against the fence in an attempt to escape, then eating what we thought was a rock, but which actually turned out to be a mouldy bit of baguette (and only the French would possibly think that feeding a baguette to a bear was a good idea...), and finally, poking dejectedly at the ditch you see in the top left bit of this photo.
But, you know, at least it had this atmospherically stagnant pond surrounded by an electric fence for scenery and shenanigans!
By far, however, the most disturbing thing I saw today was this one-eyed, twitching ostrich.
You can't really see that it only has one eye in that photo because I was unwilling to risk my own eyes by getting close enough to the fence to get a proper picture of it. I mean, that thing had an alarmingly flexible neck, and there's really no telling what it's capable of. So, maybe I didn't come away from today with a new-found sympathy for animals so much as a new-found fear of being chased by one-eyed ostriches...
But, you know, at least it had this atmospherically stagnant pond surrounded by an electric fence for scenery and shenanigans!
By far, however, the most disturbing thing I saw today was this one-eyed, twitching ostrich.
You can't really see that it only has one eye in that photo because I was unwilling to risk my own eyes by getting close enough to the fence to get a proper picture of it. I mean, that thing had an alarmingly flexible neck, and there's really no telling what it's capable of. So, maybe I didn't come away from today with a new-found sympathy for animals so much as a new-found fear of being chased by one-eyed ostriches...