I have never enjoyed visiting zoos. This is probably because I have had the good fortune to grow up in a country where I can see a plethora of animals living in the wild in their own habitats – granted these are mostly in areas set aside throughout the country for their protection. It is the confined spaces in the old-fashioned zoos, where animals were kept in barred cages with little or no privacy, cement floors, and no natural shade or water that I disliked even as a young child. My favourite memory of visiting the zoo in Johannesburg when I was about four, is of my father lifting me up and placing raw peanuts in the open palm of my hand so that an ostrich could eat them. Even seventy-one years later, I can recall the gentle tickling sensation on my hand and the thrill running up and down my spine.
One of the saddest memories I have of a zoo is taking my then sixteen-month-old son to the zoo in Edinburgh on a cold, dark and very damp day: a giraffe huddled miserably in the cold enclosure (I feel sure there has been an overhaul during the intervening years) with a wire basket of limp-looking leaves hanging at head height. I thought of the many giraffes I have seen wandering through the bushveld, or bent low to drink from a waterhole – and left.
Ted Hughes describes a visit to an average zoo in far clearer detail than I can … and especially captures the latent power of the jaguar that simply will not allow his spirit to be crushed and bent or be curtailed by the bars of his cage. I recall reading this poem during my first year of boarding school, when I was in Standard Six: all the windows in our school hostel were barred and our lives were regulated by bells throughout the day. How I yearned then for the freedom to walk in the veld as I had in primary school or on our farm; to read whenever I wanted to and to go to bed when I was tired; I missed being ‘myself’ and soon found my escape through reading novels and writing stories during our prep time: as long as I looked busy, no teachers or prefects bothered me. The Jaguar has always reminded me of the need not to give up or give in.
The Jaguar – Ted Hughes
The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion
Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil
Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or
Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.
It might be painted on a nursery wall.
But who runs like the rest past these arrives
At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,
As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes
On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—
The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—
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.
Something Over Tea 