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Wild at Heart
A mom's love/hate relationship with zoos
The other day, for his fifth birthday, I took my son Cole to the Miami Metrozoo. We make this trip at least once a year together. The first time we were there, he was barely walking, but he toddled right up to the big black pot-bellied pig at the petting zoo and looked straight in its hairy face, in love. Another time, he was wooed by a cockatoo on a trainer's arm. This year, he had a mystic experience with a one-eyed turkey.
Cole knelt to pet the tom's feathers ever so gently. The turkey would puff up, shake its tail, make a little purr-like noise (yes, I suppose it was a gobble), push close to my son, and look at him intently with his one good eye. With wrinkly red skin covering their face and dripping from their beaks like molten plastic, turkeys are at least as weird-looking as pot-bellied pigs. But Cole, my wild manic birthday boy, seemed to have connected to this one's soul. He was ever so docile and at one with this odd creature, as if it were the most beautiful thing in the world.
Zoos are places of beauty and brutality. We visit them to see the animals we love up close — to pay homage even. Yet, watching a polar bear pace or a lion stare apathetically at a noisy crowd, it's impossible not to also realize we are bearing witness to cruelty, to vestigial colonialism — to nature trapped, shipped far from its homeland, and held captive. That's part of why the public was so enthralled by the story of that tiger mauling a man in San Francisco in December: Even before we knew the drunk had taunted the beast, we guessed exactly where the killer was coming from.
Cole knelt to pet the tom's feathers ever so gently. The turkey would puff up, shake its tail, make a little purr-like noise (yes, I suppose it was a gobble), push close to my son, and look at him intently with his one good eye. With wrinkly red skin covering their face and dripping from their beaks like molten plastic, turkeys are at least as weird-looking as pot-bellied pigs. But Cole, my wild manic birthday boy, seemed to have connected to this one's soul. He was ever so docile and at one with this odd creature, as if it were the most beautiful thing in the world.
Zoos are places of beauty and brutality. We visit them to see the animals we love up close — to pay homage even. Yet, watching a polar bear pace or a lion stare apathetically at a noisy crowd, it's impossible not to also realize we are bearing witness to cruelty, to vestigial colonialism — to nature trapped, shipped far from its homeland, and held captive. That's part of why the public was so enthralled by the story of that tiger mauling a man in San Francisco in December: Even before we knew the drunk had taunted the beast, we guessed exactly where the killer was coming from.
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