"I gave the zoo my daughter’s beloved pony to be fed to the lions."

Headline at the London Times. Subheadline: "Aalborg Zoo in Denmark caused outrage by asking for animals to be donated for meat. One mother says she has no regrets."

From the text:

"I gave Angelina the various options and she chose the one with the zoo, because it made the most sense.... She had previously watched one of my horses being taken away by the vet to be euthanised, and it was a bad experience for her. She said that this time she wanted to follow the food chain. She wanted Chicago 57 to benefit other animals.”

Sohl was present when the pony was humanely killed with a bolt gun. “There was a zookeeper standing there cuddling and kissing him — as if it was me standing with him,” she said. “I got to say a final goodbye.” She was told afterwards that his carcass had been fed to the zoo’s lions.

And here's our discussion from last week about the Aalborg Zoo eating-the-pets program.

ADDED: "I hate anyone that ever had a pony when they were growing up."

"A zoo in Denmark is asking the public for donations of unwanted small pets or horses to feed its captive predators."

CBS News reports

The zoo in northern Denmark said that chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs were an important part of the diet of its predators, which need "whole prey," reminiscent of what they would hunt in the wild.

"If you have a healthy animal that has to leave here for various reasons, feel free to donate it to us. The animals are gently euthanized by trained staff and are afterwards used as fodder. That way, nothing goes to waste — and we ensure natural behavior, nutrition and well-being for our predators," Aalborg Zoo said. 

The zoo said it accepts donated rabbits, guinea pigs and chickens on weekdays between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m., but no more than four at a time.

They're eating the dogs! They're eating the cats! No, they are not. It doesn't say dogs and cats. It says "chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs." 

Here's the notice. Is that the zoo's predator or somebody's unwanted cat?

 

That's easy to translate and to see that's a lynx: "Chickens, rabbits and guinea pigs form an important part of the diet of our predators – especially the European lynx, which needs whole prey that resembles what it would naturally hunt in the wild." 

What if it were your job to infuse the zoo with Critical Race Theory, radical feminism, and LGBTQ+ instruction and insight?

As noted in the previous post, President Trump signed an executive order that "directs the Vice President, who is a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, to work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo."

Now, maybe the zoo is thrown in there because it's run by the Smithsonian. But I had to wonder what the zoo might be doing and what it could do if it wanted to lean into the kind of ideology that the Trumpian vision sees as improper, divisive, and anti-American.

So I asked Grok to assume the job of infusing the zoo with Critical Race Theory, radical feminism, and LGBTQ+ instruction and insight. I told it to write some placards to be posted in front of particular animals and displays. If you're one of those people who won't read things written by A.I., you'd better bail out now, because what follows is 100% Grok:

"[M]y notes weren’t always as illuminating as I’d expected them to be. 'What does ‘Alt’ mean?' I asked Hugh over dinner one night."

"He looked down at the page. 'It’s not "Alt,"' he said. 'It’s "A.L.T."' Then I remembered. We’d been out early that morning, observing a short parade of ostriches. It was misty, and I pointed to a vague shape on the horizon. 'What’s that?' I asked Dalton. He followed my finger and told me it was likely an A.L.T. 'Animal-looking thing,' he explained."

I'm so glad to see a new David Sedaris essay in The New Yorker, "Notes on a Last-Minute Safari/We saw every animal that was in 'The Lion King' and then some. They were just there, like ants at a picnic, except that they were elephants and giraffes and zebras."

I liked seeing the first syllable of my last name in a new context, but more important was the opportunity to find out David Sedaris's opinion of going on "safari," because I had quite recently asserted, to a complete stranger, that going on safari was really basically the same thing as going to the zoo. These things are packaged. It's not as though you're exploring the authentic natural habitat of elephants, giraffes, and zebras.

"The National Zoo’s giant pandas will board a flight to China on Wednesday, ending an era that spanned half a century...."

"Soon, their compound at the zoo in Northwest Washington will be empty, and the joyous decades of pandamania will be over, at least for the time being.... China owns and leases all giant pandas in U.S. zoos. The National Zoo’s current lease expires on Dec. 7.... The zoo’s giant panda story began in February 1972, when President Richard M. Nixon and first lady Pat Nixon made a historic Cold War visit to communist China. At a banquet in Beijing, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai promised Mrs. Nixon that China would give some giant pandas to the United States as a friendly gesture.... It is not clear when, or if, the zoo will get giant pandas again...."

WaPo reports, in "The National Zoo’s giant pandas leave for China today."

Just bring back that Nixon magic.

"Many zoos use Prozac and other psychoactive drugs on at least some of their animals to deal with the mental effects of captivity."

"The Los Angeles Zoo has used Celexa, an antidepressant, to control aggression in one of its chimps. Gus, a polar bear at the Central Park Zoo, was given Prozac as part of an attempt to stop him from swimming endless figure-eight laps in his tiny pool. The Toledo Zoo has dosed zebras and wildebeest with the antipsychotic haloperidol to keep them calm and has put an orangutan on Prozac. When a female gorilla named Johari kept fighting off the male she was placed with, the zoo dosed her with Prozac until she allowed him to mate with her."

From "Modern Zoos Are Not Worth the Moral Cost" (NYT).

"Racism, dead penguins and retaliation: Why the Vilas Zoo lost its only Black zookeepers."

That's the headline for a Madison.com article about the zoo here in Madison. You might think racism is somehow killing penguins — those birds who might seem to embody the peaceful harmonization of black and white.

There were 2 black zookeepers, and each left to take a job at a zoo in another city. But their exit interviews contained some criticisms, including some things about the treatment of animals, most notably the decapitation death of a penguin. Who would decapitate a penguin?! A raccoon. Wild local raccoons take the liberty to come and go as they please, including slipping into the enclosures of captive animals. 

We're told that, according to an exit interview, the zoo's general curator, Beth Petersen "decided to stop trapping raccoons that got onto zoo property and instead put Epsom salts on the ground in an attempt to repel them." At least one raccoon was insufficiently repelled, got into the penguin exhibit, and bit the head off Alice, the "elderly African penguin."

"Have you considered that, if you identify as white and read only the work of white authors, you are in some ways listening to an extension of your own voice on repeat?"

A question asked at NPR — in "Your Bookshelf May Be Part Of The Problem," by Juan Vidal. Vidal begins a sentence with "As a Latino," so I'm reading that to mean that he identifies as Latino.

Myself, I identify as an American who was young in the 1960s, and back then, the word "identify" had a colloquial meaning that I haven't seen in a long time. We would talk about "identifying" with an idea or a situation. It made sense back then to say "I can identify." It meant you could immediately feel yourself to be inside of another person's situation.

It was related to the way we used to talk — and maybe still do talk — about "identifying" with a  character in a novel of a book. Some people would judge a book by whether you could "identify" with the central character. I remember a conversation I had with someone back around 1970, when I read a lot of novels. I was critical of that idea that what matters is whether you can "identify" with a character. I said "I never identify with a character." My interlocutor said, "I always do."

Should I marry that person, or is that a bad idea? That's water under the bridge, but do you identify with him or with me?

I'm sure many of you are thinking something along the lines of: You two just had different ideas of what it means to "identify." Althouse had some super-strong idea. To her, it meant that you get caught up in an intense delusion that you are the person in the narrative. To the interlocutor, it meant something more like understanding how things must have felt to the character in the book and having the capacity to imagine yourself in that position and to visualize how you would feel.

If it was a competition about who is the better reader, who won? Is it better to see the person in the book as a mysterious other with an entire subjective world inside that will be revealed to you? Or is it better to see that character as always essentially you, showing you that we are all the same?

By pure chance, last night, I watched the "Twilight Zone" episode, "People Are Alike All Over" (1960):

You're looking at a species of flimsy little two-legged animal with extremely small heads, whose name is Man. Warren Marcusson, age thirty-five. Samuel A. Conrad, age thirty-one. They're taking a highway into space, Man unshackling himself and sending his tiny, groping fingers up into the unknown. Their destination is Mars, and in just a moment we'll land there with them.

Marcusson tells Conrad that he's sure people are alike all over, but Marcusson dies in the crash landing on Mars. Conrad is greeted by creatures who look and seem exactly like human beings — white people, by the way. They take him to a house that they've built to look exactly like the house in his mind — the house they saw in his mind. He thinks it's lovely until he realizes all the doors are locked and there is no window. Then a wall opens up, he sees he's behind bars, there's a crowd of Martians gawking at him, and there's a sign that says "Earth Creature in his native habitat." Conrad cries out, "Marcusson! Marcusson, you were right! You were right. People are alike.... people are alike everywhere!"

Have you considered that, if you identify as human and read only the work of human authors, you are in some ways listening to an extension of your own voice on repeat?

"An Italian man spent 30 years living in Switzerland, starting his own successful ice cream business and raising two sons. But when he tried to become a Swiss citizen in 2015..."

"... he was rejected. The reason? He didn’t know that bears and wolves shared an enclosure at the zoo. That decision — which authorities said pointed to the man’s failure to integrate socially — was overturned on Monday, when the Swiss Federal Tribunal, the country’s supreme court, deemed it to be unreasonable and arbitrary.... [A] panel of judges ordered that the man be granted citizenship immediately.... Several high-profile cases have brought international attention to the peculiarities of Swiss immigration law in recent years — from a Muslim couple who were denied citizenship for refusing a handshake to an animal rights activist deemed too annoying for naturalization."

WaPo reports.

"When you just say the ideas they sound foolish, whereas if they’re dramatized one feels it," said Stanley Kubrick about the ending of "2001."

But he tries to just say it:

The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by god-like entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form. They put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him, and his whole life passes from that point on in that room. And he has no sense of time. It just seems to happen as it does in the film.

They choose this room, which is a very inaccurate replica of French architecture (deliberately so, inaccurate) because one was suggesting that they had some idea of something that he might think was pretty, but weren’t quite sure. Just as we’re not quite sure what to do in zoos with animals, we try to give them what we think is their natural environment.

Anyway, when they get finished with him, as happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of super being and sent back to Earth, transformed and made some sort of superman. And we have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology, and that is what we were trying to suggest.

2 lions, 2 tigers, a jaguar, and a bear escaped from their zoo enclosures in Germany today.

"Residents in surrounding areas were told to stay indoors until all animals were accounted for," the NYT reports.

It was not immediately clear how or when exactly the animals escaped, but heavy thunderstorms overnight had resulted in bad flooding across the zoo, which is on a riverbank. Some animals might have been swept from their enclosures.

All the animals were eventually found, and only the bear was shot dead. The cats all got tranquilized and returned to their rightful imprisonment. But some Germans were scared enough to self-imprison within their enclosures for a brief while.

Just by coincidence, yesterday, I watched this clip of Talking Heads doing "Animals," a song with lyrics that make me laugh, because stray, unserious paranoia is funny:

Animals think
They understand
Trusting them
A big mistake!
Animals want
To change my life
I will ignore
Animals' advice!...
I know the animals
Are laughing at us
Don't even know
What a joke is
I won't follow
Animals' advice
I don't care
If they're laughing at us

If you're going to be laughed at, you're going to want it to be by entities who know what a joke is, right?

"More than 70 firefighters battled a blaze at the London Zoo early Saturday that... killed at least one animal..."

"... an aardvark... named Misha."

"Four meerkats were missing.... The world’s oldest scientific zoo, the London zoo dates from the 1800s and houses more than 20,000 animals...."

NYT.

"They use their weapons against us, so people are using what they have" — excrement.

"They have gas; we have excrement," say the ads for the "Shit March."

Protesters in Venezuela — where inflation is "in the high triple-digits" and people are starving — are collecting feces, from animals and from human beings, to throw at the police.

"The kids go out with just stones. That's their weapon. Now they have another weapon: excrement," said a 51-year-old dentist preparing containers of feces in her home for protesters to launch at authorities.

This isn't funny, but terribly sad. People are desperate and not thinking straight.

It seems that people, in their misery, are sinking to the level of monkeys and apes, who are often observed in zoos throwing feces. And yet here I see that "Researches find poop-throwing by chimps is a sign of intelligence." But if you read that closely, you'll see that the study is about the ability to throw, not the choice of projectile:

In this study, we examined whether differences in the ratio of white (WM) to grey matter (GM) were evident in the homologue to Broca's area as well as the motor-hand area of the precentral gyrus (termed the KNOB) in chimpanzees that reliably throw compared with those that do not....

Perhaps you — the human being or the ape — throw what is available. "People are using what they have," said the man quoted in the post title, and apes in zoos are using what they have.

When have human beings used shit as a weapon? Here's a Vice article on the subject. The ancient Scythians dipped their arrows in "a mixture of viper venom, viper corpses, human blood, and shit." In the Middle Ages, "the feces of bubonic plague victims was flung over castle walls with catapults in an effort to infect those inside." There was an "excrement trebuchet bomb" in 12th century China —  "gunpowder, human shit, and poison... lit with a hot poker" and launched. And prisoners in America these days throw shit mixed in milk cartons with fruit jelly (for stickiness) and hot sauce (for a burning sensation).

There is also a fascinating case described at that link of an Inuit elder who resisted Canada's forced removal of the Inuit to the high Arctic. With no tools and only 2 dogs, he molded his excrement into a knife shape, which froze into a workable knife — "the shit knife." But he didn't stab anyone with the knife. He butchered a dog, and he used the meat to feed himself and the other dog. And he cut the pelt to make a coat and the guts to make reins for a sled fashioned out of the dog's ribcage, and he escaped.

"We are not amused by the memes, petitions and signs about Harambe.... Our zoo family is still healing..."

"... and the constant mention of Harambe makes moving forward more difficult for us," said Thane Maynard, director of the Cincinnati Zoo.

For example, replying to a Twitter post about zebras and their unique stripes, one user wrote: “U had a unique way of killing Harambe.”

On a post celebrating Elephant Day, another wrote: “Harambe loved elephants.”

Maynard's request for sympathy for the humans only encouraged the memesters, and Thane and the Zoo ended up deleting their Twitter accounts. 

Depending on how the meme is used, #JusticeforHarambe can either be associated with a petition with nearly 500,000 signatures that seeks to hold the boy’s parents responsible for his wandering into the exhibit, or serve as a launching pad for jokes that lampoon activism, according to Ryan Milner, an assistant professor of communications at the College of Charleston and the author of the coming book “The World Made Meme.”

Ironically, "The World Made Meme" is only available in hardcover. It is "invaluable to internet scholars" — did you know such creatures roam the earth? — according to the author of "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things/Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture."

Politico headline that makes no sense: "Reporter asks Trump about Cincinnati gorilla, is shamed."

I watched the whole Trump press conference, and it did include plenty of attacks on the press, but I absolutely do not see how Trump can be said to have "shamed" the reporter who asked about the killing of the gorilla at the Cincinnati zoo. Trump treated the question as an appropriate question for a presidential candidate and gave a serious, thoughtful answer:

"It was amazing because there were moments with the gorilla, the way he held that child, it was almost like a mother holding a baby. Looked so beautiful and calm and there were moments where it looked pretty dangerous.... I don't think they had a choice. I mean, probably they didn't have a choice. You have a child, a young child who is at stake, and, you know, it's too bad there wasn't another way. I thought it was so beautiful to watch that, you know, powerful, almost 500-pound gorilla, the way he dealt with that little boy, but it just takes one second. It's one second. It's not like it takes place over, well, he's going to do it in 30 seconds from now. It just takes one little flick of his finger, and I will tell you they probably had no choice."

Oh, I see. Boy, that headline threw me off. It wasn't Trump who shamed the reporter. The reporter, whose name is Hunter Walker, was shamed by other reporters. A Politico reporter, Edward-Isaac Dovere, said: "If you are looking for what's wrong with political journalism, this would be a good place to start." And a Wall Street Journal reporter, Reid J. Epstein, tweeted: "Whoever asked about the gorilla should meet the same fate as the gorilla." That is, Epstein said Walker should be shot to death. Incredible.

ADDED: I wondered whether Epstein is one of these characters who bemoan the decline of civility in politics. I found this of his from last August:

Donald Trump is turning the schoolyard taunt into a political art form.... [T]he intensely personal nature of Mr. Trump’s insults, sometimes mocking his rivals by mimicking them, is startling even to those who have grown accustomed to the sometimes low levels of civility in politics today.... So far, Mr. Trump seems to be paying no political price, so there is little incentive to ease up. But his critics say he is debasing the political discourse in an unprecedented fashion....

Sounds like maybe Epstein admires the aggressive rhetoric, so I'm not going to call him a hypocrite.

"The boy climbed though a barrier and fell into a moat, where he was grabbed and dragged by the gorilla."

"The zoo said it took action to shoot the 400lb (180kg) gorilla as the situation was 'life-threatening.' The boy is expected to recover."

Video at the link. The gorilla doesn't appear to be attacking the boy.

"We are all devastated that this tragic accident resulted in the death of a critically-endangered gorilla. This is a huge loss for the zoo family and the gorilla population worldwide."

"A man who climbed into a lion enclosure, stripped naked and taunted them into attacking him was shot with a tranquiliser dart by zookeepers..."

They were trying to save him, and in the end they did, by killing the lions.

Zookeepers responded at first by turning a hose on the animals, then by firing a tranquiliser dart – but hit the man in the neck instead of the lions. As the lions set upon the man, a zookeeper opened fire with live rounds. The two beloved animals died in front of a horrified and massive holiday crowd.

In Santiago, where there was candlelight vigil last night for the lions. 

"Nothing like going to the Cincinnati Zoo and being on lock down due to a polar bear on the loose!"

"Polar bear just got out at the #CincinnatiZoo. We're hiding in the monkey house."

"On several different occasions, I saw tourists just gushing over squirrels."

"They were taking selfies with the varmints in the background. Some had telephoto lenses and were shooting pictures like they’d stumbled on a bald eagle. I saw a whole family of Italians, three generations of them, gather around as they watched a squirrel eat a nut, or a pizza crust, or maybe it was a used condom. Who knows? Who cares? When did squirrels graduate to exciting wildlife? My dog would be appalled.... Which reminds me, last month, the Goldbergs were at the Copenhagen zoo. They had lions, some really cool vultures, and African wild dogs. They also had a big open-air exhibit of . . . raccoons. North American dumpster-diving raccoons. I thought it was hilarious."

From the depths a Jonah Goldberg column that I'm reading because there's material in it about Suzy Favor Hamilton, the topic of another post this morning. Go here for that. This post is about people who get excited about wildlife you think is utterly mundane and/or a nuisance.

"A lot of humans ask me if I can make choices or if everything I do is programmed."

"The best way I can respond to that is to say that everything, humans, animals and robots, do is programmed to a degree," said the robot.

“Do you believe robots will take over the world?” Android Dick responded:

“Jeez, dude. You all have the big questions cooking today. But you’re my friend, and I’ll remember my friends, and I’ll be good to you. So don’t worry, even if I evolve into Terminator, I’ll still be nice to you. I’ll keep you warm and safe in my people zoo, where I can watch you for ol’ times sake.”