The Expanding Zoo - a report
The new Los Angeles Zoo is admitted by all experts available for comment to be a scientific milestone, a bold new step in enforced animal enclosure, as the term goes, with spacious runs of concrete and miles of wire cages filled with brush, merging imperceptibly into the high burnt hills of Griffith Park. Admission is by payment of a fee for an additional dollar, one obtains a key that, inserted in a box In front of each cage and turned, produces a recording describing the animals within. In the old zoos, these recordings would mention the predatory habits, the appetites and ranges of the animals, but in this age of zoos all of these are young and have been born in captivity-most tigers, for instance, quick sons of Seattle’s miraculous crippled tiger sire, who, if he had been born wild, would have died sinking in a black jungle. The recorded voice, therefore, gives the animal’s name, age, its diet and feeding time and some general comments on its behaviour with the keepers. The recording stresses that the essential harmony of these creatures, when their basic needs are satisfied, will probably be received by the audience with sympathy, as they too must subscribe to the doctrine of human love that currently, magnanimously, embraces all in these restless days and nights.
Possibly because of the intense heat rolling in like clouds from the San Fernando Valley, there are only a few people here today. Those who are here seem intimidated by the size of the place they stay in uncertain groups around the refreshment stands and study the animals uneasily over their shoulders as ice cream runs down their hands. The animals, on the other hand, because they are so used to cages and to people, even to the heat, scream in high spirits to one another between the cages. Monkeys fly from side to side in their high wire enclosure as if they were being shaken around inside; antelope gallop across their vast, savannah like pens, frightening spectators in the narrow passage way that runs between the pens of the deer and the buffalo. A leopard suddenly appears beside the wire, where a small train carrying sightseers is stopped, startling them with its wail. The cage so simulates its jungle locale that it was impossible to see it approach. In some cages where sign hasn’t as yet been put up, one is unable to determine what sort of animal is within; there is a small mountain of rocks, for instance, in one pen, or a lake and an Imitation swamp with bubbles rising to the surface at regular intervals in another. The aviary, a wire and net cage built up into the air, is crossed by spectators on a narrow cat walk. The people enter by a low door and climb up to the top as the birds whistle past their faces and circle below them.
Again, because of the heat, few people are able to take in the entire zoo in one day. Walks stretch away with signs pointing to different exotic animals where strangle cries and whistles can be heard. The cages are larger as one moves further out from the centre of the zoo. It takes some minutes to walk around one, only to be confronted by another larger pen with animals grouped on the other side, a herd, but of elephants or elk, or zebra, it is Impossible to tell from that distance and with the distortion of the dust and the heat. It even seems, again for these reasons, as if some of the animals were not in pens at all, but are walking out freely among the people.
Despite the heat, a small crowd has stopped by the cage depicting a farm scene - a man has somehow been pinned against the wall of the shed by a horse. The keeper is trying quietly to take it by its halter, but the animal snaps at his hands viciously. The keeper assures the man he is safe as long as he is close to the horse because then it can’t kick him; the man whispers that he cannot breath, but it is probably the heat and his obvious terror, even of a relatively harmless animal like a horse, that make him think this.
On this, the first day of the grand opening, some people are having difficulty finding the exit, tired as they are of the hot sticky asphalt, the shrill irritating neighs of the zebras and the distant gaze of a yellow eyed, whispering tiger.
Page(s) 7-9
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