Cages.

My recent visit to a Zoo turned horrible.  I am not a zoo person and I knew I wouldn’t feel right in there, but I wasn’t ready to see what I saw there.

He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him
More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.

                                                    Ted Hughes “Jaguar”

This poem echoed in my head when I was standing in front of a hyena. But it was the exact opposite of what the poet felt when he was in a similar situation.

What the hyena is going through looks like pure torture to me. I don’t see the Stride as wilderness of freedom. Craziness of imprisonment is what I see. Pessimist or Realist but I like to bring the negative or the blunt truth out in the open. A cage is “no cage to him?” But it is!

 Notice Boards and Placards everywhere

Don’t Tease the Animals          Don’t shout at the animals

 There was an ape which resembled Gollum of Lord of the Rings .

Its deformity, odd appearance made the crowd go wild. They cheered when it looked at them. It didn’t want their attention. It didn’t want them there. The animal looked deeply disturbed. At one point the ape threw a stone at the crowd and instead of getting the message the crowd was Wowed by it. Knowing nothing it did would make the ‘evolved’ species understand, the animal walked away.  My spirit was broken seeing all this. And the crowd which looked really happy and satisfied moved to the next cage craving for more.

Not all animals were kept in cages. But that doesn’t give any relief, as a small piece of land with deep pits around it and high fences can’t be seen as a better option. A bear looked highly perturbed, slightly schizophrenic scratching the wall with bobbling head. One consolation was that it had another bear in the enclosure.

Most apes were kept alone. The boards with their name and other details portray a happy family.

 It was heart wrenching to see them just sitting there with a blank look and an empty heart. There was no symptom of pain or suffering or eagerness to leave, what I saw was plain numbness.

The Aviary looked beautiful with all the big, tall trees. But all the birds could do was merely look at the trees from inside the wire fence around them.

A fancy separate section for the Snakes repelled the fragile souls.  It does need courage to see the poor animals kept that way.  Nine feet cobras in what looked like a cupboard.

 

And the funniest thing, the stupidest – what I saw in an Anaconda’s cage. Man thinks he’s making the cage ‘home’ for the animal and paints the walls with Green plants!

The pee collector!

     I am an ordinary person who has made many million mistakes…so far.  My earliest memory of a mistake was collecting my pee in a mug only to  pour  it out after wondering about the yellow tinge of it. Gross? Yeah…but what can I say, I was a curious child.

     I stole coins from my piggy bank. It was the love of ice cream that made me commit the “crime.”  I  would climb up sneakily to the loft, an “unreachable” place where my mom kept it. It was a small tin box  with  a slot on the lid (dad’s work, “Reuse” in the 80’s) When the thought of ice cream crept into my mind in the hot days of summer I climbed upon the door and would take as much as I needed.
 
No guilt!
   
     I was punished a lot in school  for not doing home work and for failing in almost all subjects. I wondered why the grown ups were so cruel.  What they perceived as “me” was not “me” to me. I was clueless of their ways, but I had me! 
    
     Later years , it all continued… my mistakes.  Still no guilt. 
    
     On one rainy night I found two baby bats on the steps to our terrace. I took them and fed them milk. There was no wikihow then. I took a wild guess and gave them drops of milk which they very happily licked. I was glad I found them. A little proud too as I rescued them while my sisters were scared to even look at them. After a few hours I left them in a flower pot on the terrace hoping their mom would pick them up from there. The bats that were flying by unusually close that night made me do it.  
     The next day when I went up I saw the babies dead. I had left them in the cold night. It was my mistake that they were dead. GUILT! 
     After killing the two baby bats, it was a two day old puppy that I stepped on in the dark. GUILT! 
    
     Then the three squirrel babies that recently died on my watch. GUILT! 

     Is it possible to love myself?  

     We change as we age. As we grow we become very hard on ourselves. The support we got from ourselves when we were kids become unavailable. We begin to see what the world sees of us. I was me but every mistake began to haunt me.  And how can one live without making any mistakes? 

Self love is vital to  happiness…to survival. 

Sometimes  I  need to be the girl I was when I stole the money for ice cream. I remembered how easy it was for me to forgive myself then. 
She taught me to love “me” unconditionally.

I am the only one who can free myself from guilt and that is the  most precious lesson growing up has taught me.