RDP Friday: ZOO

When I was little and my family went to the Zoo back in the days when

people use to throw junk food into the exhibits.

You could buy peanuts and use them to make the bears beg for treats.

BEG.

It was pretty horrible.

I wonder what those bears saw when they looked over at us with our bags of peanuts in our hands. I’ll bet what they saw was the stuff of nightmares. How could we not have looked like monsters from the worst nightmares you could dream to them?

AI ART BY CURSEJOURNEY

I remember that the Primate House was awful. When I was a kid,  I really hated the Primate House.

The gorillas and the chimps would sit  behind glass in rooms that looked, I swear to God, like an execution chamber in a prison. The tile, the color, the rope swinging from the ceiling.  It was grotesque.

Since those days,   I have watched hours upon hours of gorillas and chimps in rescues and at modern Zoos where they can go outside and hang out in their own private green habitats or look through the glass and interact with the public OR they can go into their rooms and ignore zoo visitors all day long if they want too.

Even though things are better in these places  ( I hope against hope they are better ) for our Primate cousins, I still wonder how they see us on the other side of the glass.

They probably still see us as monsters, but I hope they see us as the kind of monsters that have a touch of humanity in our bones.

I hope.

AI ARTWORK BY
CURSEJOURNEY