Yoga with the elephants
At lunch on Friday, Maureen had a whole heap of free tickets to The Melbourne Zoo which she'd been given, and she gave me two. They had to be used today, and there was going to be 'yoga with the elphants' in the morning.
So this morning me and Ray caught the train out to The Zoo, and indeed there was a yoga class, and they brought an elephant out to take part in the exercises. Was a bit strange. I don't know much about yoga at all, but I don't see why you would get an animal to take part in a spiritual exercise that it probably doesn't understand.
After that, spent a few hours wandering around watching the animals, and trying to avoid all the noisy kids and their noisy parents.
I don't think I'd been to The Zoo since about 1998, and I saw it fairly differently today. I didn't like seeing the bigger animals like the lions and tigers and seals in their little enclosures. Seemed like they'd be pretty bored spending their whole time there, and not even getting to hunt their food like they would in the wild. Was talking to Maureen about it, and she reckons it's okay because we and the animals are all one. She thinks the animals choose to live in The Zoo, because they're becoming extinct, and they want to stir people's consciousness.
1 comment:
...how interesting.
Is she going by the idea that the animals all have a pre-planned agreement to take up residence in human enclosures? If they had those sort of organisational abilities, one wonders how they became endangered in the first place.
If she's going by the school of thought that believes nobody is a slave to their circumstances and applying it to non-human species, then wonderful! We can all rest easy that when there is a severe injustice (or wiping out of species), we can all sit back and say 'Yeah, but they shouldn't have been there in the first place'
I'd like to think that we and the animals are one to a certain extent, but it's hard to justify it, given that we cause the deaths of so many species every year.
I do agree that keeping animals in enclosures like you described sucks rather majorly. If people absolutely must keep animals in enclosures, said people really should take a little term called 'enrichment' into account.
As for the Yoga with Elephants thing...who knows, it was probably midly amused at the goings on.
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