monkey business: performing animals at the zoo?

I took my children to the zoo today. It was the school holidays. It seemed the sort of thing to do. I awoke to grey sky and drizzle which immediately dismissed my visions of picnics and Anne Hathaway’s Cottage and replaced them with an image of my children trudging round, peering into ‘empty’ (“the lion’s resting inside”) animal enclosures clad in bright blue waterproof two pieces in a fashion not dissimilar to memories of my visits to zoos in the Seventies.

I then spent the next 45 minutes obsessively checking the weather forecast on my husband’s iPhone, ‘9am: sun with intermittent cloud’. I revisited the window. No, it’s definitely raining. Sought confirmation of this fact on the BBC Weather website, ‘rain all day’. Back to the window. Hummmm.

Packed a bag of rolls, apples, crisps (of the no MSG variety), raisins, waterproofs and peaked hats. Checked the zoo website for directions (and am interested to read that today there is in fact a ‘signing monkey’ workshop available) and hurry the children out of the door.

As a child I found zoo visits the very epitome of tedium (right up there with circuses and Holiday on Ice). It’s not that I didn’t (or don’t) like animals. But the rustling blue waterproofs, aching feet, substandard packed lunch and endless sea of glum looking primates could not even be made up for by the fact that Uncle Nick was a zookeeper and fed the penguins.

But it’s not the Seventies and we’re in a bright new world of ‘zoo-ing’. Or so I was under the impression. Zoos these days are all about conservation, education and protection of endangered species rather than the making of a buck or two by caging animals. And I’m sure it is. But it didn’t seem to have made much difference from the spectator point of view.

I walked my rustling blue clad children around enclosure after enclosure of gloomy apes. Skruh skruh skruh. The monkeys managed to look a little perky but those apes, goodness me! They couldn’t have looked more miserable. I tested this out on my 4 year old. “Do the orang utans look happy or sad, darling?” “Sad.” “Well what about the gorilla?” “Sad.” “…the chimpanzees?” “Sad.” Until we came to a sign that said “The apes are not sad. An ape ‘happy face’ has a turned down and relaxed mouth. An ape grins and bares its teeth when it is unhappy.”

We moved on to the ‘signing monkey’ workshop. Now I don’t know what you are imagining when you read this. I know what I was imagining. A monkey. A monkey doing sign language. Not a seasonal worker sweating buckets in a large comedy character monkey outfit.

On reflection, my reaction speaks volumes about how we still see zoos and animals in captivity. The zoos might have moved on in their philosophy but have we?

After the workshop (for workshop read ‘ordeal’), we put on our blue rain protection (with enough rustling to make a real monkey ‘grin’) and left the overheated room on our way to the 3pm showing of the elephants playing football.

Read last month's post: shopping trolley