A little girl walked out of the Ape House at the Washington Zoo last week. The sign above the door promised apes. It definitely smelled like apes, but the apes were not at home. They were all lounging and roaming outside in the jungle area. One ape scratched his apish rear (scratching is as popular with apes as with baseball players). Another nursed a baby, and scratched. A third sat on a rock, head in his hands, looking humiliated, and scratched. This is what apes do all day at the zoo.
The little girl screwed her face into a distorted version of herself and looked up at her mother.
“Mommy, please tell me I will never see anything like that again,” she said.
“Sure, sweetie,” said mom, clicking a text into her phone absentmindedly. They walked toward the hippos. The little girl was about see something like that again.
Don’t get me wrong, the zoos I have visited are all nice places filled with nice people looking at captive animals and captive animals looking at nice people eating junk food. Everyone on both sides of the fence seems compliant. For the animals, however, there are not many options. The moats are uncrossable, the bars unbendable, the glass unbreakable. We like to put a healthy distance between our hairy, furry, naked, toothy entertainment and our hairy, chunky, nacho-guzzling asses.
What are these animals really thinking? I am not sure we really want to know.
The elephant did tricks for treats while sweating people with frozen lemonade applauded. Two orangutans walked a couple of cables about fifty feet above a throng of people all saying the same thing in different languages.
“Hey, look at that big monkey up there!”
Mira que grandes mono!
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??????????, ??? ??????? ????????!
?????? ??? ?? ?????? ???????!
Regarde ce gros singe!
Sehen Sie sich, dass die großen Affen!
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Guardate che grande scimmia!
???????????????!
Looking up, I noticed that one orangutan looked pregnant. The man in front of me in the stretched golf shirt also looked pregnant. They could have been siblings, but the orangutan was better groomed. A lot of butt and groin scratching ensued both with the man and the monkey.
A giant Panda lay flat on its back in a manmade cave. It looked like a guy I knew in college after a rough night.
“Wow, he looks so peaceful,” said a grandmother.
Of course he does. He’s asleep. If I visited her at 3 am, she would be relatively peaceful too, snoring with her teeth in a glass.
I suspect that animals begrudgingly tolerate us. I know Rudy (our Jack Russell) does. While we were on our D.C. trip, he stayed at a doggy daycare (and nightcare). Dozens of dogs appeared to be having the times of their lives at this place. The people were great. There were fences and toys and he got his own crate to sleep in. When we picked him up, he was pissed. Not because he missed the trip to the zoo, but because he thought we had left him in one.
If humans are ever actually abducted by aliens, this is what will happen to us. I saw Planet of the Apes. It will be less like that and more like the zoo.
We will do tricks, stand on one foot and scratch. We will sit in Lazyboy’s, watching ESPN behind glass while Star-Trekian beings ogle us, clap and eat alien junk food. There is a lot of crapping at the zoo, so we will probably do that too, right on the ground in front of alien kids. Now and then, they will toss us a treat for executing our mundane existence. At night they will hose us down and we will sleep on our backs, peacefully like Pandas.