Zoos…some of you haven’t visited one in quite a while (okay, many of you), maybe since you were a kid.  They’re calling you, you know.  They need your tender loving care and money.  That’s what I’ve thought every time I’ve taken my kids to a zoo over the last 8 years.  I’m continually shocked at how some exhibits (always the newest ones) are so popular and so cool, but at the same time how some of the exhibits are so pathetic and antique, unloved.

Examples: Cool – Asian Highlands exhibit at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs CO –big corporate underwriter Coors; Pathetic: porcupine in a cage at the same zoo – no underwriter, porcupine doing a sad, continuous, side-to-side dance of utter frustration and desperation. 

My young son does a fabulous imitation of that same porcupine, which family members applaud.  But it’s incredibly sad that this is the thing he should take away with him, the desperation dance.  Will he also remember the look of ennui on the faces of the orangutans and gorillas, the pacing of bears and wolves?

During my quality time with the family yesterday we visited a small, local city zoo.  Granted, this particular zoo has been making enormous strides considering the state of the local economy in this middling Midwestern Rustbelt town.  But again, the same sad, decrepit entrapments and tanks containing the most pathetic specimens of the animal kingdom, attracting my child’s time and attention.  The petting area houses a dozen or farm animals, bloated with too much 25 cents-a-handful feed, so fat they can barely move, so bored they can do nothing but eat to break up their day.  For some of the children who visit, this is the closest they will ever get to the animals that make it to their table, clothe their backs.  My children have been fortunate to see a real farm – and I recognize that I’m fortunate, too.  Blessed that my children and I have been able to see many different zoos and animals from places that we’ll never visit; fortunate to recognize when animals in habitats are thriving and when they’re not.

Yeah, you think we should be spending our time on the pithy stuff of life, like peace in the Middle East and cures for AIDS and cancer.  We should be concentrating on when to pull the trigger on the Iraq issue and what the hell will fix the economy and the stock market.

But our children deserve childhoods that are rich and highly textured, like the childhoods we had.  Sure, I grew up seeing body counts from 'Nam on the evening news, remember the shootings and despair of losing both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, concern over oil prices, rising inflation, double-digit interest and unemployment rates, came of age amidst herpes and the discovery of AIDS.  But I also remember the first time I held a sea urchin and a starfish in the Touch Pool at the San Francisco Aquarium, saw a rare Przewalski’s wild horse at the San Diego Zoo, experienced the apparent serenity of the sea vicariously at the Shedd Aquarium and watched monkeys frolic at the John Ball Zoo – they punctuated my childhood, as did joy of the first walk on the moon, the Space Station and the first shuttles; the specialness of watching Jacques Cousteau and National Geographic specials.  I want this same punctuation in my children’s lives, so they know the hunger of curiosity and understand how interconnected all these things are with the rest of the world they see in the news.

I’m writing a check today, both to join the local zoo society and to make a donation.  My family may only visit once a year, but it could make a big difference to both my kids and to the zoo itself.  Cheyenne Mountain needs $50 million to replace all the antiquated exhibits like the porcupine habitat; my local zoo will need far less to get started on a similar initiative.  Every little bit will help – your check could make a big difference.  Don’t forget your closest aquarium – fish need lovin’, too.

Maybe positive punctuation in our adulthood through donations of time and money to support education on ecology and conservation would be to our benefit right about now, before the next big event in our adult lives makes us forget about the big picture and connectedness.

2:52:49 PM    comment []