Tag Archives: zoo

Pandas and Pokemon

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zooIt was panda breeding season when we visited the zoo a few weeks ago, so access to the panda enclosure was limited. We could only get a glimpse of the male panda through a big Perspex window as he kicked back in his pad munching down on a carrot.

Because these creatures are notoriously devoid of sexual energy zoo staff ordered us to be deathly quiet: one bit of over-exuberant human hoo hah could spoil three months of carefully planned panda foreplay and set back the course of their hanky panky indefinitely. Now that’s performance anxiety. “Sorry, sweetheart, the sound of a human coughing faintly in the distance appears to have killed my dick, so could we just do the Netflix without the chill for the next eighteen months or so?” Get them some earmuffs, for Christ’s sake! Seriously, though, what a squad of true losers comprise this doomed species of fuck-shy, Sooty-faced nuns. Most of us human males would still be able to get it up during an earthquake on a battlefield littered with the half-dead bodies of wailing, dismembered orphan soldiers. A few of us would even insist upon these conditions. You know who you are…

We couldn’t even get a good look at the panda, not only because of the scores of fellow panda-peekers huddled into the viewing area with us, but also because our collective lines of sight were obscured by a mass of trees and foliage that had been planted and positioned to shield the panda from the sight of our disgusting inter-species lechery. So there we both were, my partner and I, craning our necks to get a glimpse of a panda eating a snack through a gap in a thicket of trees the size of a postage stamp, as a crowd of people all shushed each other and swished their phones and cameras in the air above their heads. It was like being at a deaf rock concert in a Chinese monastery. I envied my toddler son, who didn’t even have to pretend to give a shit about the pandas, and was quite content to spin around in circles making helicopter noises.

monalisaThe whole sorry panda extravaganza reminded me of a visit to the Louvre ten years ago, during which I found myself distinctly underwhelmed by the Mona Lisa. There it was – this tiny picture of a long-dead woman wearing a thin smile suggestive of a recently secreted silent fart – encased in Perspex and half-hidden by the heads of a hundred people or more. I’d already seen her enigmatic fizzog hundreds of times throughout my life, as have we all, considering that the Mona Lisa is literally the most famous portrait on earth. Why should I fight through a crowd to get a fuzzy picture of something I could see in any one of a million books or reproductions? Clearly my main – and perhaps only – motivation would be to immortalise my sophistication on Facebook for all the world to see. I don’t need pictures for that. I can just wait ten years and then write an obscure blog post about it that will be read by six Albanians and my second-cousin. Did I mention I visited the Louvre? I may make a lot of jokes about poos and tits, ladies and gentlemen, but by God I’m  sophisticated and urbane.

Watching those people blankly snapping pics and flicks of the panda as it nonchalantly chewed on a carrot brought home to me how ridiculous humans are as a species. Perhaps it’s we who deserve an extinction-level reduction of our libidos. This is fucking madness. Say you recorded footage of the panda on your phone. Who’s going to watch the video? Your friends and family? They’ll be bored shitless. Seriously. They will. Trust me. You? What’s the point? You know you were there. Do you really want to watch that footage again? Of a panda doing ostensibly fuck all? Is your camera a gun-substitute? Are you hunting these creatures and collecting clickable trophies as a testament to your digit-based prowess? By all means take a few snaps at the zoo to act as memory joggers of days gone by for those moments in the years to come when you find yourself frail and insensible and drooling at a window pane, but for God’s sake leave the wildlife programming to David Attenborough.

The only circumstances in which you should be filming pandas are if: a) you come across one unexpectedly whilst doing the weekly shop in Tescos, b) you’re breaking into its zoo cage dressed as another panda and attempting to fuck it.

We left the zoo at closing time, and as we moved down towards the main gate we walked through a huge throng of people of all different stripes. They were all chatting excitedly and immersed in their phones. There was a queue of thousands outside the building, clamouring to join the advanced guard. They were ‘hunting’ Pokemon. The zoo was hosting a private after-hours event. Thousands of people, ignoring the real animals in favour of taking pictures of imaginary ones.

Come on, asteroid. We’re in dire need of our extinction-level event! Make haste!

More zoo-based nonsense: The Hero of Edinburgh Zoo

Quiver, Mortals, for I am the Hero of Edinburgh Zoo

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100_3490We took our son to the zoo as a birthday treat last week. As I was holding him in my arms above the red river hog enclosure (African piggy things that look like the warthog from The Lion King), his Captain America cap tumbled from his head and fell twenty feet to the ground below. One of the pigs was snouting and snuffling its way across the enclosure, on a direct course to intercept the cap with its hungry jaws. It had already half-devoured a large paper packet that contained the remnants of its latest meal, and we had no reason to doubt, as it drew closer and closer to my son’s favoured headwear, that we’d be saying bye bye to the Cap cap once and for all. The pig nudged and drooled at the cap with its wet snout, before pushing it aside like a hockey puck and continuing on its slobbery way. We breathed a sigh of relief. There was still hope.

I took the wee guy down the steps at the side of the enclosure, handed him to his momma and strolled down the hill, a strong sense of purpose propelling my limbs. I stood with the palms of my hands pressed against the top of the first of the two fences that marked the perimeter of the pigs’ domain. What sort of a father would leave his son’s favourite cap – a superhero cap, no less – to rot in a piggy prison when it was within his power to put things right? What sort of a father would leave an injustice-shaped hole in the fabric of his son’s burgeoning universe, and turn a blind eye to the hot tears of frustration coursing down his cherubic little cheeks? Not on my watch, universe. Not for this pot-bellied father!

“Jamie, it’s okay, he doesn’t really care. Look, he’s happy, let’s just go see the flamingos, he’s perfectly fine.”

But I could tell that he was dying inside, the poor little bastard. We all knew what was about to happen…

“Don’t you even think about it,” she said, as my fingers started twitching, and my arms started flexing. “Don’t you bloody embarrass me, Jamie.”

Huh! And I guess Iron Man was embarrassing, was he? When he was SAVING THE WORLD? Oooh, don’t save the world, Iron Man, you’ll give me a red neck. I’ll never be able to show my face at the lunch club for ladies, let’s just forget this silly baddy fighting malarkey and go out for some tapas?!

“Honestly, we’ll find a zoo keeper and they can fetch the hat later. It’s okay: you don’t need to do this.”

Huh! And come back to the remnants of a half-devoured hero’s hat, and see the sickening smiles of satisfaction under the snouts of those wicked beasts? Tell you what, why don’t we just throw our son over the fence and be done with it. No, that hat is coming back to us, by God, or I’ll be gored to death trying. AVENGER ASSEMBLE!!

hogWith all of my might, I hurtled myself over the imposing three-foot fence, bounded forward two feet and then mustered all of my remaining reserves of strength – both physical and mental – to clear the hellish bulk of the second three-foot fence barring my way. I may even have beat my chest like a gorilla, I can’t honestly recall, the adrenaline was running too high.

I trailed a gaggle of pigs behind me like the Pied Piper of Ham-lin (I just high-fived myself) as I strode across the enclosure. I bent down and heroically scooped up the cap and held it aloft in my fingers of justice. Snuffle, snuffle, gobble, ruffle, snort. The pigs advanced on me like a rash of hairy asthmatic tumours, their tusks trained on me like spears. I could almost hear the Indiana Jones music playing in my ears as I vaulted the two fences to the safety of the main thoroughfare.

“Well,” I said with a Ferris Buellerian smirk as I handed the cap back to my adoring son. “What do you think about that?”

“Oh, Jamie,” my partner said, as she struggled not to faint with relief and admiration. “I really, really, really want to check our boy into a crèche and have you sex the fuck out of me right here against the very fence that was the site of your greatest act of raw, almost over-powering machismo. Give me that noble, selfless penis, give me it right here and now, you bloody warrior.”

Well, perhaps I’m paraphrasing ever-so-slightly. What she actually said was:

“You fucking idiot.”

292457_421261067939971_1651654860_nI just smiled. Because that’s when you know you’re a real hero. When you’re not hero-ing for the praise. You’re just hero-ing because… well, because you don’t know how to be anything God damned else. It was at that precise moment I realised that Nickelback had probably penned their song with me in mind.

“Now let’s go,” I said, puffing out my chest, “before a zoo keeper comes along and gives me a telling off.”

We hot-footed it out of there.

Just as Captain America himself would have done.

My good lady was still shaking her head. “You do realise those pigs are about as dangerous as the ones at Muiravonside Country park?”

I scoffed. “That’s the sort of talk that got Steve Irwin killed.”

Hero status: intact.

PS: If he’d dropped his hat in the chimp or tiger enclosure, I’d’ve taken the £8 hit.

MORE ZOO-RELATED TOMFOOLERY IN MY NEXT PIECE ON PANDAS AND POKEMON

Additional animal mayhem from the archives

The time I killed a snake in Turkey…

2012 trip to the safari park: Part 1

2012 trip to the safari park: Part 2

Dealing with grief:the death of three rats and a dog

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…