Imprisonment

To hear some people tell it, zoos are horrible places, where captured animals must live out their foreshortened lives in cramped prisons, for the entertainment of the masses. Undoubtedly, there are many zoos such as that; personally, I‘m horrified by the cockfights that were so prevalent n the Philippines of my youth and by some tiny cages of abuse I’ve seen and heard about elsewhere.

And yet, there’s the well-run zoo, two of which come to mind. Krista works at the Abilene Zoo full-time all summer long; our zoo, which is very, very small, treats its animals very well indeed and refuses to “outgrow itself,” meaning it won’t acquire more animals than it can house and staff well. When, inexplicably, Abilene found itself the keepers of a couple of polar bears, they promptly traded them to a zoo in the North with a climate far more suited to the cold-loving bears (and acquired brown bears, which can tolerate the heat better and that can retreat any time they like to their air-conditioned quarters. And what about conservation? Here’s an interesting example: there are only a little more than a dozen Cohelan Box Turtles left in the wild. They were almost extinct. Little ol’ Abilene, Texas has seven of these rare turtles, earning that right because, under our keepers’ watchful care, they have procreated and flourished.

We went to the San Diego Zoo last week, spending two days at that marvelous facility. Our admission tickets (around $40 each for Ken and Krista, who went for two days and $33 each for Katie and me, who only went one day) went, as we were reminded repeatedly throughout the day, to massive conservation efforts as well as the upkeep and care of the zoo and animals themselves.

Today K4 visited Alcatraz in the San Francisco Bay, a prison where humans have been incarcerated for years. We “enjoyed” seeing the place where Al Capone and The Birdman were imprisoned, but in case I may have given you a different impression, I don’t want to go to prison--ever. I’ll try to learn to live with my hypocrisy because I do not want to live in jail and yet I don’t mind if animals are—kindly, well, safely—kept in zoos. And I’m delighted that Krista has such a responsible job at the zoo, one that utilizes and expands her many talents.