Rondayview

Where the wild things are

Imagine. You're a three hundred pound gorilla and for thirteen years you've been locked in a small enclosure. Sure, it's an "award-winning gorilla habitat" and the food is good, but what you really want is to be free; the call of the wild is innate, and a decade of captivity hasn't killed the spirit of the inner beast. Instead of freedom, you're a thing on display, to most no different than a statue behind glass in a musuem, and treated with the same indifference. And every day, in the hoards that gawk at you with their empty faces, there are the cruel ones. Kids mostly, disrespectful and centered on themselves, focused only on satisfying their own decadent desires--likely with parents who are the same--they taunt you and tease you, they throw trash and rocks, sometimes hitting you, sometimes hurting you. One day they go too far. The inner beast screams for release, and the wall that forever seemed impossible to climb no longer seems so large. You gain your freedom and your anger rages. Those who caused your pain are all around, and the animal in you attacks. All you seek is to finally be free, but you cannot comprehend that there are no jungles here, no wilderness beyond the walls that held you. Man has displayed you in his world, and outside your "habitat" does not want you here. He fears you, so he finds his guns, and in the end, your moments of freedom are payed for with your life.

Sound like fiction? Sadly, this tragic story is true. I've merely told it from the gorilla's perspective.

No, I don't much care for zoos. They're not where nature intended wild things to be, but unfortunatly they're where many wild things are.