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San Diego Zoo
Sunday, September 12 1999
The neighbor girl Lisa invited Kim and me to join her and her nanny-charge, 4-year old Scotty, on a trip to the "World Famous" San Diego Zoo. Lisa takes Scotty there often, but neither Kim nor I have ever been there in our entire year-long San Diego experience.
One truism to which I've been a slave since meeting Kim: "it's always better to smoke pot before one goes to a museum or zoo."
The whole ride to the zoo, little Scotty was going on and on about a soup he wanted to make. It was going to contain glass, trees, eyeballs, dirt, cars, lightbulbs and the "entire earth." I played along, of course, being as subversive as propriety allowed. It's not difficult to be a hero for a brilliant four year old.
For all the raving I've heard about the San Diego Zoo, it wasn't phenomenally better than, say, the Washington DC Zoo (which I visited back in 1994). In San Diego it's possible to have more year-round outside space for tropical animals, but it's never really warm enough for a truly heat-loving creature. For example, on this typical San Diego day the flamingos in the fragrant flamingo pond seemed to be shivering in the mid-60s air.
It cost us $16 each to get in (though Lisa and Scotty had special member passes), but the place was crowded all the same. Lisa said the turnout was actually unusually light for a Saturday. Most people were elsewhere, perhaps at Street Scene '99, the overpriced San Diego music festival.
My favourite creatures at any zoo are always the primates. I'm fascinated by human connections to the animal world, and zoo primates always do the most amazingly human things. But I've always been kind of nervous around zoo monkeys ever since my Dad told me of being pelted by monkey shit during one of his zoo experiences (that may have actually happened at the San Diego zoo back when he was working at Scripps Institute in La Jolla in the early 60s). The first monkeys we encountered were several species cohabitating with a family of rare otters. One monkey couple engaged in a brief sexual act and then went down to the stream to wash their food like raccoons, at which point the otters arrived and stared at them for awhile. I was hoping for more of a Wild Kingdom moment, but it never came.
Several Spider Monkeys kept us similarly entertained with their limb-like tails and beckoning genitalia. The girl spider monkey even sucked the boy spider monkey's penis momentarily, conclusively demonstrating that oral sex is not a human invention.
Chimes in Jen Wade:
No, in fact, it's not even a primate invention. I've observed mice and
hamsters engaging in this sort of behavior both as a component of sex, and
as a grooming behavior.
In fact, in rodents, genital licking by mothers of their pups is a crucial
component of maternal behavior. The mother licks the genitalia of her pups
several times a day, stimulating reflexive urination and defecation, and
allowing her to recycle water and nutrients during the
energetically-draining lactation period. Baby mice of either sex whose
mothers are prevented from licking their genitalia will experience "failure
to thrive": they will lose weight, stop growing, and eventually die as
their mothers' milk dries up. This discovery was first published in 1976
by Friedman and Bruno in the journal Science.
Anyway, I guess my point is that oral-genital contact is probably a common
thing among mammals, and perhaps other groups, but that it doesn't
necessarily indicate a sexual intent.
Then there was the Howler Monkey with his enormous pink hairless scrotum hanging a good six inches outside his body. They looked so fragile, like they'd get stuck on a branch and abruptly torn off should he suddenly decide to do monkey stuff, like swing limb to limb.
Somehow we ended up in the children's petting paddock to hang out with overfed representatives of nearly all of the various goat breeds. They were completely placid and extremely tolerant of even the most annoying of children (and even the most bone headed of adults), but they still had to do their special goaty things. They'd periodically go off into their special "break time" paddock and butt heads like true wild animals.
The only thing that really bothered me about the exhibits was how little information the signs provided about the fascinating underlying evolutionary realities. I've always wondered how Linneaus could have really appreciated his taxonomy without any accompanying evolutionary understanding. But in a zoo environment, where a New Guinean tree kangaroo looks and behaves a lot like a Madagascan lemur, it seems to me remiss not to show some sort of chart demonstrating how unrelated these two really are. Could it be that the zoo is trying to be sensitive to Creationists? Why do Creationists even bother going to zoos? How can anyone appreciate the diversity and wonder of life while accepting on faith that there's no natural order underlying it?
Believing she was late in taking Scotty home to La Jolla, Lisa brought us along. It turned out that we were actually early, and Kim and I found ourselves waiting for Scotty's parents in the parking lot of their palatial mansion. Like most modern mansions, this one sat on a depressingly undersized lot. I found myself idling away my time in the back of Lisa's car playing Tetris on my PDA.
On the way home, Lisa's car (a VW Fox) started making a funny noise as we climbed a steep grade. I looked under the hood, tugged a few belts, and somehow (without knowing quite how) I made the sound go away, confirming my theory that some mechanical issues are more about art than science.
Me & Kim. Our hair is getting long and we're growing old.
I have no idea what that black dot is on my cheek.
Lisa & Scotty
A San Diego Zoo gorilla.
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