Zoos are not the preferred accommodations of most wild animals. With tight living quarters, restricted diets and their inability to hook up in kinky, bestial ways anytime and anywhere, they probably become pretty pissed off living in cages. You don’t need to have a Ph.D. in Zoology to know that when pissed off animals get loose, they are going to seek retribution and are not going to take the time to look for the teal and salmon colored name tag that reads “zookeeper.”
So, with the threat of death by mauling looming behind every Dippin’ Dots cart, zoos are not my kind of tourist trap. Give me a botanical garden or contemporary art museum any day. Sure, my husband claims that Museums of Modern Art are pretentious institutional frauds, but I say: “Take my money, my intellect and my dignity but leave me my entrails, please.”
Being as attached to my innards as I am, I avoid zoos, but on the rare occasion that I am required to visit, I would welcome a hit of MJ’s propofol. However, there is one time of year that I can visit a zoo without sedation: Springtime. Something about a zoo in April or May is less animalistic, more maternalistic. Babies, babies, and more babies. Baby elephants, baby hippos, baby tigers, baby giraffes, baby monkeys, and of course, all of the human babies in strollers.
My husband and I visited a big city zoo during one its baby booms a few years back. Watching the tenderness of a mama tiger nursing her babies momentarily made me forget that a sleep-deprived tigress with raging hormones and a touch of postpartum depression would gladly take off my arm for dinner and save my liver for a bedtime snack.
After surviving the tiger cages, we headed to monkey cages.
We stopped at the monkey cage to watch a mama monkey manage her brood of obstinate babies who were far more interested in playing on manmade monkey bars than going with their mom to the back of the cage for some lunch. One of the monkeys did a twirl or two around the rope as his mama chased him and prodded his monkey butt with her nose; the other baby monkeys took advantage of their mother’s distraction and mucked around a bit for the crowds that gathered to watch the animal kingdom version of Kate and her eight. (The dad monkey, nowhere in sight, was rumored to be in Hawaii with a younger, less domineering monkey.)
As we watched, my husband said: "Let’s have one.”
“A monkey?”, I responded incredulously.
“No, a baby,” he said as he took my hand and gently kissed it.
Being a sucker for a cute guy with a good line, we monkeyed around that night.
It took and that was the extent of our family planning.
But if parenting is so easy that monkeys can do it, why couldn't we?
