If you’re a lover of both irony, and birds of prey then you’re about to have trouble believing your luck – because have I got a killer of a blended suggestion for you?
I have, actually, the rhetorical bastard that I am. Get yourself down to Cumbernauld’s World of Wings, and stroll around its array of bird-stuffed cages as you listen to The Beatles crooning out their forgotten song ‘Free as a Bird’ through the pulsating ear-buds of your personal stereo.
Dear reader, this will generate so much irony that Alanis Morrisette will eventually come along and write a song about it. But it will also be depressing. Terribly, achingly depressing. A symphony of sadness will sweep across your psyche like a smouldering brush-fire, scorching into your soul the blackened truth that crackles through every atom of the universe: that existence is nothing but an unseeing, cold-raging fire of despair that will burn endlessly to infinity, before turning and burning back again into nothingness. Hmmmm? Why, no, I didn’t lose my virginity until I was 18. No, no, I’ve no idea, either. Total mystery, mate.
OK, let’s not get carried away with hyperbole, shall we? Christ, you lot are incorrigible. Let’s just say that the confluence of bird and song will at the very least create the sort of sadness that will make you think: ‘Bloody hell, this happy song by The Beatles about freedom isn’t half creating a powerful juxtaposition with the reality of these avian slaves I see shackled before me’.
And, yes, I said personal stereo back there in the second paragraph. You wanna make something of it, pal??! As if it’s any of your fucking business, but I’ve decided to stay relevant in today’s youth-centric society by violently refusing to update any of my cultural references. I just won’t do it. Opal Fruits, tape decks, Creamola Foam, shell-suits, mortgages: if you protozoas out there don’t know what any of these archaic words mean, then you can jolly well go and fuck yourselves. You’re living in MY world, buster. Not the other way around.
Anyway, it didn’t even occur to me straight away that the birds at World of Wings might be sad, or even that they had all that much to be sad about in the first place. There’s a bit of species prejudice at play here – at the very least species blindness – because a feeling of shared sadness is the first one to strike me upon entering a zoo or a safari park.
Yes, there may well be vital – or at least vaguely beneficial – conservation efforts going on in our animal parks, but I can’t help but think that it’s far from magnanimous of us higher mammals to chuck animals into a cage just so that millions of our snot-caked children can point and laugh at them as they fuck.
Few animals get a sweet deal out of our tender loving care, especially in zoos. Look at the trade-off the elephants have to make.
Cons: No freedom; brain-battering depression; unsuitable climate.
Pros: cream buns; every shit you take enthusiastically cheered.
And the lions in a safari park might be safe from poachers, but they’re not safe from the six months of carbon monoxide poisoning they receive per annum from the millions of motorcars growling and trundling past them seven-days-a-week at peak, the worst of their human occupants blasting out Peter Andre at full volume – which is a much, much worse torture for the lions than any amount of lung destruction.
But the birds? What more do they want, right? They’re spoiled compared with the big cats. They get to have a little flap around at display time, sitting on their handler’s arm munching on dead mice, occasionally swooping so low and close over the heads of the watching humans that at least one child every time starts crying and screaming in terror. Then they get to sit on a perch, safe from predation and deforestation, just sitting there licking their cloacas and staring with growing amusement at the conga-line of ridiculous-looking primates sashaying past them. It’s a pretty good life, right? What were they going to be doing if they were out there? Splitting the atom? Inventing a new hair-style? They’re birds. They imitate phones and they shit on your car. That’s what they do. That’s what they’re for.
Except a tear in my girlfriend’s eye quickly opened my eyes. I hadn’t even known Kate had been upset, because she’d been quietly, subtly upset – a sort of not-wanting-to-cause-a-fuss sort of an upset – and my attention had been divided into kaleidoscopic portions by the darting, defiant and explorative movements of our fleet-footed children, those whooping agents of mayhem. I couldn’t blame them. It was visually vibrant and interesting, lots of noises permeating the air, fine on the whole for the two-thirds of us suspected to be some variant of ADHD, but fine-ish too for the autistic portion of our clan, the background thrum not over-powering enough instantly to plunge them into a sensory nightmare.
“Where did that squawking come from?”
“Dad, look, up on that perch, that parrot thing!”
“Aw, it’s copying us. That’s awesome! Try saying BUMS to it! BUMS!”
Here a vulture, there an eagle, everywhere birds chained up legal… wait.. Kate. Are you crying?
When Kate turned round to face me with red, shimmering eyes, I felt the same surprise that Michael Jackson’s date in the Thriller Video must have felt when she got a swatch of Mikey’s yellow zombie-eyes. I hugged her, and, conjuring every ounce of compassion and empathy in my soul, thought to myself: “Uh oh, what have I done?” I must have done something, I reasoned in that millisecond, because I couldn’t perceive anything in the environment or the day so far that could have triggered such sadness or sensory disruption. And Kate loved animals, right? Well, yes, she does… which is why it came as a mild shock to her to see so many birds – stalwarts of the savannah, majestic gliders of the mountains – tethered to tree trunks behind wire-mesh bars, or cramped in conditions that were antithetical to their wild natures.
She hadn’t even wanted to mention it; hadn’t wanted to let the kids see her and put a crimp on their fun. It’s not like she was weeping and wailing; that she wanted to smash the system, or start freeing the birds, or loudly protest, or march us all out of there under principle. She’s both empathetic and autistic, and all-round an intrinsically kind and compassionate person who can’t help but feel connected to other living things, especially children, animals, and the people she loves. Kate conceded that there was probably or possibly wider context, or some benefit, to the birds’ lives here, and in all places like this, but in the moment – in that heart-breaking moment – it was hard not to look around and share her view that this was Bird Alcatraz. And if the parrot-thing up on that perch had been shouting anything earlier, it had probably been: ‘GET ME A FUCKING LAWYER.’ One of the vultures even had a ‘FLY FREE OR DIE’ tattoo on its arse-cheek, next to an empty bag of vulture crack. Most of the birds looked like they wanted to bite off their wings then roll over a cliff like a boulder-with-a-beak.
Yes, we help to save and conserve these birds. We protect them. No, they probably won’t get taken out by a hunter’s rifle or a bigger bird, or a wolf or a rabid buffalo or whatever the hell, while they’re in our care, and some of them will probably be re-wilded, but they’re still in cages. We still line them up to gawk at them. Imagine a bunch of emus going for a day-out at an orphanage, with a Daddy emu pecking on the glass and shouting to the startled human children: ‘COME ON, STAND UP, MAKE A FUNNY FACE, I PAID A BLOODY FORTUNE FOR THESE TICKETS… WORLD OF FUCKING LEGS, INDEED! Oh, I dunno, maybe they’ll be more entertaining when they bring them out of their cages at one o’clock for the 100m relay race, and the fire-making.’
The kids and I spent some time with a South American condor. I say ‘spent some time with’. We gawked at it behind the glass of its enclosure, and copied its movements. When it ran, we ran. When it jumped in the air and slammed back down again, we jumped in the air and slammed back down again. God, it was cute. Or so we thought. Really the thing probably wanted either to kill us or shag us, and by mirroring its death threats and seductions back to it we’ve probably booked that condor at least one future visit with the bird psychiatrist. The day ended with us watching the bird display as the heavens opened and the rain tumbled on top of us. Water seeped through our clothes and into our bones. Even the youngest of our tribe, Christopher, was bored shitless by the ceaseless circular swooping of owls and little African birds. He spent most of his time trying to bend my fingers into ‘Vs’ so he could direct them at the bird-handler who was giving the presentation and get me in trouble, giggling maniacally as he did so.
“I know it’s wet, but would anyone like to stick around while I go fetch the vulture?” the demo chap asked, as the rain thundered out his words.
“No,” we all said, and our family filed off back to the car, wet and miserable, figuring that, next time, a visit to the Borstal might be a better laugh.