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Bore Drummond Safari Park – Part 2: Lion Bastards

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After savaging David Dickinson, this lioness used his balls as toys.

And so to the lion enclosure. Lions are great, aren’t they? Surely they must be the bee’s knees, the cat’s bollocks, the mane men, the pride of the park? Well… not really; the first few minutes I spent in their enclosure, slowly looping around the track, was about as exciting as watching my own domestic cats rolling around and licking their balls, albeit on a slightly larger scale. OK, I did see a couple of lions having sex, but that didn’t last long. Certainly not long enough for me to take advantage of my nascent hard-on (To wank along to the scene outside, of course. Not to run out there and join in a giant lion gang-bang. I’m not a pervert, for Christ’s sake!).

He’s going for the sexy shoulder bite, but she still couldn’t give a fuck.

I could relate to the lion, though. Mid-way through the sex the female got bored, ejected his catty cock from her liony labia, and staggered off. She slumped down on a patch of grass fifteen feet away from him, and started to have a kip. I don’t know if lions are capable of feeling dejected, but this guy looked pretty fucked off and miserable. No wonder the males go out on the savanna and kill things. It’s not to eat: lions are actually vegetarians. They just disembowel springboks to make themselves feel manly again after their wives have booed off their shagging skills.

In fact, hang on. That’s not even true, is it? The males do a tiny bit of the hunting, but it’s the lionesses that do the bulk of the running, ripping and killing. So the lions are crap in bed, don’t provide food for the dinner table, and just sit around all day growling at other guys and preening their big hair and doing their nails. I think the pandas might have some competition in the 2013 ‘Who’s Up For A Bit of An Extinction?’ contest.

‘I said Hakuna Matata. HAKUNA MATATA WAKE UP YOU BASTARD!!!’

I drew my car up alongside a group of lions that were sleeping on the grass and tried to coax them into action by burring the window down and blasting up the volume on the radio. It sort of worked. One of them waggled its ears a wee bit. Hardly the stuff of Attenborough. I don’t know what I was expecting, to be honest. A full-on lion rave?

Luckily, there was excitement – and danger – on the horizon. Two lions, who had been relaxing next to a cluster of tree stumps further up the enclosure, started stalking towards my car. Their stares were cold and unblinking, and I’m sure I detected a twitch of primal hunger on their lips. Then, just as my heart started thumping in my chest, they meandered lazily past me and flopped down next to the other lions who were sleeping at the other side of my car, and joined them in a kip. You lied to me, Disney. You said these cunts were fun, and could talk, and form religions and shit. But they’re crap.

If only I’d had the presence of mind to smuggle in a couple of sheep from the field outside I could really have livened things up – given a few children one or two interesting things to say to their psychiatrists in later life.

‘Now, Jeannie, can you trace all of the recent bad events in your life back to one discernible root cause, perhaps in your childhood?’

Jeannie rocks in her seat, grasping her knees with white knuckles, saliva foaming at the edges of her mouth. ‘Yesssss,’ she stammered. ‘The day …the…lovely… sheep died.’

This… never happened at the safari park.

So, disappointingly, the lions did fuck all. You can hardly blame them, I suppose. If a bus-load of lions had visited my flat on a typical Sunday afternoon I doubt they would have witnessed anything more exciting than the odd bit of dish-washing, ball-scratching or half-hearted masturbation. Actually, that’s not true. I probably wouldn’t have been doing the dishes.

Still, why would a bus-load of lions come to my flat? And what maniac would transport them there? Somebody needs to answer these questions.

Have you ever heard a lion’s roar? I mean, not on TV: in a safari park, or in the wild? When your bowels can pick up the sound first-hand? Later on that day, when I was pottering about elsewhere in the park, I heard it. Rumbling, growling, roaring. Like it was coming from everywhere in the park at once in one rectum-rocking symphony of primal terror. I was glad to be hearing that sound in the safety of an open-prison for beasts, rather than out on the savanna with a packed lunch and a spear.

The next enclosure contained many bison. But who, apart from other bison, gives much of a fuck about bison? Moving on…

‘Get busy swimming… or get busy dying.’

Ah, the sea lion show. Now you’re talking. I never fully realised the unbridled happiness and joy an animal could bring to my heart until I saw those slippery guys cynically exploited by the promise of food into performing hilarious tricks. The trainer claimed that the sea lions always enjoy themselves while putting on the show, and I guess the club-shy bastards’d better show it if they ever want to eat again this millennium. To be honest, though, the faux-cynicism I’m affecting here could find no purchase-hold in my head or heart during the ten or so minutes I was privileged to watch those two adorable creatures at work.

That tasche will be coming off for Movember.

While they were sitting still and awaiting instruction, their heads bobbed and rocked about in a figure of eight motion, which brought to mind a sub-aquatic Stevie Wonder. When active, they darted and dived into and out of the water, balanced balls on their snouts, imitated seals, called on command, climbed stairs and jumped off of high boards. I loved them!

But possibly the greatest thing one of the creatures did, something that made me laugh uncontrollably each time it happened – that I think is one of the simplest yet best things I have ever seen an animal be trained to do – was clap! It clapped! It sat on its podium, threw back its head and slapped its flippers together like a mad-thing. And my face lit-up like a Syrian government building each time. Usually the sea lions did it in tandem with the audience, which somehow made it even funnier. Perhaps I’ve found my happy place – what’s the sound of one sea-lion clapping? I don’t care. It’s brilliant! Still, there’s room for improvement: if they can somehow teach them to smoke it’ll be fucking awesome.

‘Here I am, MIMED-SEAL DELIVERED, I’M YOURS!’

I’ve heard it said that it’s good for the mental faculties to absorb at least one new fact a day, so yours is coming up a few sentences from now. If you discover that you already know the fact I’m about to share with you, then go and open the dictionary and find a word you’ve never heard of and learn it, so you don’t feel left out.

Ahem, here goes: the way to tell the difference between a seal and a sea lion is by looking at the ears. Apparently the seal has internal ears, and the sea lion has protruding ears. This is fantastic, for a number of reasons, but most crucially: we now know that a sea lion can do an even better Stevie Wonder impression than we first imagined.

OUR JOURNEY AROUND THE SAFARI PARK CONCLUDES THIS WEEKEND.

Bore Drummond Safari Park – Part 1

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Baaaaa-oorrrrinnnngg.

I hadn’t been to the safari park since I was a kid. As I drove up the winding, field-flanked road, all I could see were lazy battalions of sheep. Surely things hadn’t changed this much? Sheep the main attraction of the safari park? If I was going to part with a tenner then I wanted to see animals that I had never eaten before. Or, at the very least, animals that were capable of eating me back.

OK, of course there were wild animals. Maybe there wasn’t as varied a selection as you would find in a zoo, but at least the whole experience felt marginally more humane: no big, sad gorillas with their haunted, ‘pass me a blade’ eyes; or hyper-tense tigers who looked close to dashing their grrrreeeeaaaat big brains out against the reinforced plexi-glass windows; or even waddling brown bears trapped in two-by four-feet enclosures, dreaming happily of their days having cigarettes ground out in their eyes back at the Russian Circus.

Nothing even a millionth as exciting as this happened on my trip.

Well, it looked a little more humane; but I’m not one hundred percent sure that it was. Yes, animals are afforded greater freedom in a safari park as opposed to a zoo, that’s true. However, part of me thinks that subjecting animals’ lungs to a daily pollution-output that’s equivalent to that generated by an eight-hour-long traffic jam is less than kind, and should the animals ever learn to talk I find it unlikely that their first words will be a chorus of ‘Thanks’. And if that turns out to be the case, it’ll be a very sarcastic thanks, drowned out by wheezing and coughing.

I drove through the three animal enclosures. To my great disappointment, the first enclosure contained creatures that were only marginally more impressive and entertaining than the sheep I’d encountered at the gates; there being a heavy emphasis on deer, and bulls with great big bloody horns, which didn’t exactly fill me with wonderment and awe. 

Yaawwwwnnnn. Get fucked, Bambi.

I got the feeling that just before the park opened back in the sixties those in charge had looked around, scratched their heads, and thought, ‘Hmmm, it’s good, but it’s a bit empty, isn’t it?’, and one of their number had scurried into the nearby woods and returned with an armful of hedgehogs and squirrels, and somebody else had given a shake of the head and said, ‘Nah, but you’re thinking along the right lines; get back in there and think bigger!’

OK, there was something to be said for the bulls with the gigantic horns – those things were so big and so wide that they could have pierced either side of a bus – but I didn’t want to see shit, every-day animals with extra bits added on to them. I wanted to see strange, alien animals from the darkest – and lightest – most far-flung reaches of the globe. Not deer, ducks, cows and motherfucking seagulls. When I think safari, I think Kenya. And when I think Kenya, I don’t think seagulls.

‘Hey! Yo! Over here! Fuck the giraffe, mate, check out our quality flying!’

To be fair, the presence of the seagulls probably wasn’t part of the plan; it’s just that the little cawing bastards get everywhere. Wherever there is garbage, or the promise of garbage, there they’ll be. They’re especially attracted to buildings containing clusters of humans who don’t want to be woken up at 5am by the sounds of seagulls fighting over a Pringle and shagging, the noisy feathered cunts.

I don’t know. Perhaps the gulls were just jealous of the safari animals’ exotic celebrity status, and wanted a slice of fame for themselves. In support of this theory, just try taking a picture of an animal in the park next time you’re there – any animal at all – and take a good, long look at the photograph. I guarantee that in each one you’ll find a stupidly grinning seagull – possibly beaming out from behind a bison – that’s just jumped into shot, giving you its best thumbs-up. Well, sort of a feathers-up, but you get the idea.

I read somewhere that urban seagulls that live within a 30-mile radius of the park hang around the bins behind B&Q so they can dip themselves in half-empty tins of fluorescent orange paint, and then fly back to the park and dive bomb into the lion enclosure. ‘Who, me? Yeah, I’m exotic. I’m from Africa, actually, yes. I’m a Senegal Seagull, doncha know? Make sure you get my good side.’

{joke deleted as it involved the camel ‘having the hump’}

Thankfully, somewhere amongst the shit animals and seagulls, there were a few camels strutting about to liven things up. Well, I say liven things up – they’re hardly party animals. But they do move a little like those fluffy, head-bobbing puppets that you operate with the cross-handle and the strings, and that can only be a plus-point. Besides, a camel isn’t something you see every day in Scotland (unless you work in the safari park, I suppose – it’s all relative), and they did meet my criteria of being an animal that I haven’t yet eaten. Note the ‘yet’ in that sentence, camels: I’m coming for you, you tasty sons of bitches. Actually, I might let you live, given that you can both read and access the internet, and are therefore a super-intelligent creature with much to teach our species. Well played, camel. Well played.

If you haven’t seen The Mist, do so NOW. If only for the last few minutes, which will have you laughing like a monster.

I’d only ever seen camels on television, and I hadn’t realised how massive they were. As one of them lumbered towards my car it reminded me of that scene near the end of The Mist, where they’re driving through the fog and encounter that big fucking gigantic spindly thing that makes a noise like a haunted foghorn. So, yeah, camels are big. And ugly. And smelly. And humpy. What’s that? You want me to take over from Attenborough after he dies? No problem. My knowledge of the animal kingdom and its nomenclature is extensive. You want to know about sharks? Personally, I find them pretty swimmy and taily. And bitey. Bow down, Davey. Your documentary days are over. {Since writing this I’ve actually ridden a camel, but I can’t say too much about that until after the court case}

OUR JOURNEY AROUND THE SAFARI PARK CONTINUES TOMORROW…