Anthropos to the Zoo, A to Z.

The alpha and the zeta, pinnacle to pit of life on earth, oriented which way around?

We contain multitudes. Slugs, worms, a ferret, a lame cow, a cruel and cowardly cat, are all in me. Therianthropy. And zoanthropy: the belief that one is a manifestation of a beast. No delusion: we are animals. Lower animals? Upper animals? Meaningless syntax of superiority.

My 13-month-old daughter was moderately interested in the enclosed animals, and extremely interested in the free. A pigeon sitting atop the cage of the wildly plumaged Tucan, for instance, or that species which seems to me to have more variety than others: a dizzying array of skin tone, shape, structure of face, fat deposits.

I observed that those with more young in tow tended to be the most rotund, one splendid specimen whose abdominal reserves distended beyond the artificial coverings that it had draped around itself was surrounded by, and barking at, 4 separate offspring, all of which in various stages of bloating toward the parent's prototype. An otherwordly anthropologist may conclude therefore that diabetic obesity, conferring as it does no physical adaptive advantage, was the product of sexual selection. I do not find these examples of our species enticing, but I am by no means a typical vehicle of sexual pressure on the society.

Cages then, for those other species, and moderated diets, along non-aesthetic lines, giving ostensible health. The padding tiger for example, a stunning thing, even impoverished in its might by the glass and concrete.

Meerkats shaming mere cats with their dexterity. An owl wise, bored of onlookers. Monkeys of near-human intelligence, bored without onlookers. They might know and lament the narrow strictures of their lives, but the alternative is not the jungles of yore but squalid death and extinction.