Wheat and Chaff

We went to the Denver Zoo on Tuesday. It was a beautiful day, and our plan was to get our zoo visit in before school was out, to avoid all the kids. Unfortunately, we didn't plan on the sloth of teachers at the end of the school year, who rather than continue to teach their kids up till the last possible moment, took all of them to the zoo instead. So the zoo was packed.

I think I hate zoos. Probably a quarter of the exhibits were just empty. Many of the coolest animals were absent, sleeping, hiding or just really bored and sad looking. It was twenty two bucks, and there were maybe six really good exhibits. Maybe I'm expecting too much? Maybe I have false impressions of how cool other zoos were? I don't know. All I know is that I could have thought of dozens of better ways to spend the time, let alone the money.

But Katie liked it. I guess that's the important thing. And she's young enough that I don't have to spend a lot of time debunking all of the signs in the zoo (No, the lemurs are NOT our cousins. No, chimpanzees are NOT just like us. Notice which one's in a cage, spending his life naked and being watched by the other.)

I think maybe zoos are run for the purpose of propagandizing and raising funds for eco-hippie causes. I speak with no certainty on this, but I certainly saw a great deal of propagandizing. One item that would have been thrilling to my community out here- reintroduction of prairie dog towns in Colorado, with all of the attendant loss of grazing lands and broken horse ankles that goes along with that.