Going to the zoo has always scared me. Seeing those poor animals in cages, prodded with sticks by fat little kids, and then spoon fed half-digested meat every meal for years at end reminds me of my early childhood. Another reason I hate going to the zoo is because I always watch those shows on TV that have crazy animal attacks. I saw this one where some obese dumb woman was going up to a bear’s habitat thing in a zoo, and when she turned to look at her dumb husband filming, the bear grabbed her face and just started going to town. I guess that’s what you get for messing with some animal that really hates living in a cage. The bear just thrashed the hell out of her, and the husband filmed, and he ran a commentary instead of helping save his wife. I can’t blame the guy though, I would film it too. I mean, he obviously didn’t love his wife, or he wouldn’t have taken her to the zoo. He would have taken her to a nice dinner, and then serenaded her by whispering sweet nothings into her ear. At least, that’s how Andres Bobadilla ’06 shows his affection. Anyway, for life insurance reasons, I think that videotaping her beating by a bear would be the best thing to do. That guy was smart. You know damn well he was thinking about whether or not he sent in that month’s life insurance bill. Plus, and I bet you didn’t think of this, if you have a particularly good video on those TV shows, then they pay you to show your video. I bet that guy made about two hundred dollars by just holding up a camera and acting like his dream weren’t coming true. Besides the fact that I can relate to the animals, and that I hate the videos of people getting messed up, there is something else about zoos that scares me. Have you ever seen a higher concentration of fat children in your life? At the Bronx zoo, there are just kids walking around with ice-cream cones, picking food up off the ground, yelling at each other, and complaining to their parents. Have some respect. Those kids laugh when the hippo is going to the bathroom. If I were that hippo, I would be humiliated. I bet that’s why the animals go wild on those TV shows: they are sick of fat little kids laughing at them. There is no point to having a zoo. Unless your last name is Hearst, and your first name is William Randolph. That guy had the coolest zoo ever, because he didn’t laugh at his animals. Hearst’s castle was like heaven for animals. There were animals in Africa on the waiting list, trying to get deported to California and live on a hill. If you were a tiger, and had to pick between living in the Bronx with fat kids laughing at you all day, or relaxing next to a mansion with movie stars and gold-inlayed pools, which would you pick? My friend went to China and showed me video clips of bears on unicycles going across tight-ropes. How the Chinese trained them to do this, I do not know, but it was sick. One exception to the anti-zoo rules I have is if it involves Taylor Hall. Matt Yeager ’06 has a mini-zoo in his room. He has about 35 gerbils, a goat named Binki, and he is trying to put Foster Jebson ’08 in a cage and feed him food, but that goes against some hazing form Yeager filled out earlier this year. In his closet, next to his zoo, Yeager has what we like to call a “botanical garden.” It’s really just a tall plant under a heat lamp. Anyway, you should check it out some time. There is something relaxing about his garden. I hope you learned several things from this article: 1) I was raised in a cage, 2) The Bronx Zoo has a lot of fat kids 3) William Randolf Hearst was the man, and 4) Matt Yeager ’06 grows marijuana in his closet.
