I’ve been want­i­ng to vis­it the zoo at High Park for a while. I thought it would be more like a farm, with lla­mas and cows and rab­bits, which would be cool, but it’s actu­al­ly got a lot of ani­mals that we don’t usu­al­ly see! (Oooh, and the zoo is free, so it would be a great place to vis­it if you’re ever in the city! :D)

But first, here’s a duck. Kind of an inter­est­ing-look­ing duck. He looks pret­ty pleas­ant in the pic­ture, but he (or she?) was actu­al­ly hiss­ing at all the peo­ple in front of him at the moment. 

I was real­ly look­ing for­ward to see­ing the lla­mas. They’re one of my favourite ani­mals. I once saw a girl hold­ing a lla­ma plush but I was too shy to ask her where she got it from. I lat­er searched online and I think it’s one of the Webkinz. Any­way, I digress. Here’s a lla­ma stand­ing in the pond, cool­ing off, I guess. 

There was a friend­ly young lla­ma com­ing close to the fence. 

Then we saw a large, majes­tic bison.

Some wal­la­bies. They look like rab­bits from far away.

Some mou­flon sheep, grazing.

A yak, eat­ing and swing­ing its long fur­ry tail.

A young yak, drinking. 

 A turkey, its tail all fanned out like a peacock.

And in a near­by space, an emu, chill­ing in the shade. Can’t see it in this pic­ture but it looked like it had a sil­ly grin on its face.

And final­ly, an ani­mal that’s freely roam­ing in the zoo — a nin­ja squirrel.

Not a white squir­rel, but it has a white belly.

I like vis­it­ing zoos. But when I saw kids bang­ing on the fence and tried to scare the ani­mals and I thought, where does that come from!? What did the ani­mals do to you? What if there isn’t a fence and you’re in the wild? Would you want to be yelling and threat­en­ing the ani­mals then? But I thought it was­n’t my place to say anything.

Indeed, when I was stand­ing in front of the bison I real­ized that there was mere­ly a 30 feet dis­tance and a wire fence between me and the bison. What would hap­pen if the fence isn’t there? Would I ever be able to see this ani­mal out­side of a book or web page with­out this fence? I’m a bit of a scaredy cat so I would­n’t real­ly go near a large, free-roam­ing ani­mal, not even a large dog. But is it worth it for the ani­mal to sac­ri­fice its life­time of free­dom just so that humans can go see it? I heard that ani­mals often live longer in cap­tiv­i­ty, hav­ing a sta­ble sup­ply of food, being tak­en care of if sick, and with­out their nat­ur­al preda­tors around. But I won­der if they’d pre­fer a long, seden­tary life, or a rel­a­tive­ly short­er life with all the dan­gers but also free­dom and dif­fer­ent things to see and expe­ri­ence. Does it make a dif­fer­ence to them?

Part of me thinks it’s sad that the ani­mals are caged. But when I saw that the lla­mas and mou­flon sheep just kept chew­ing their food calm­ly and stared back blankly at the kids who were try­ing to scare them, part of me laughed and thought, the ani­mals might be think­ing that we humans are caged and look at how enter­tain­ing­ly sil­ly they are!

I still don’t have answers to these ques­tions, and I still like to go to the zoo, because I think ani­mals are so beau­ti­ful and fas­ci­nat­ing. I imag­ine that when I meet my Mak­er in Heav­en one day I’ll be able to befriend these ani­mals, with­out fences and fears.

Have a love­ly evening, everyone!