Menagerie of Cruelty

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A large banner at the entrance to the zoo lions promised lions, tigers, bears, snakes, and dinosaurs. Padraic and his three coworkers were skeptical - only fifteen renminbi to see dinosaurs in south-central China? Surely they would charge more.

Disturbingly-upbeat techno music blared at the gate. A bear lay on the concrete floor of its tiny cage. Padraic and his three friends approached it and looked deep into the beast's defeated eyes. The pair of lions next door were somewhat livelier, if only because the mother lion had her cub as a companion. At least they had each other.

A liger in the next exhibit paced its cage and made a particularly pitiful sound. The abomination's lamentable environment was predictably placed between the lions and a defiant solitary tiger. A small cage could not contain the free spirit of this wild animal - its eyes reflected hunger and anger, not sullen resignation. The tiger sniffed at the three foreigners. She stalked along the outer rim of her cage, looking for a way to encircle her exotic prey while a Chinese man approached and made a taunting noise. Willie told Padraic "You're the biggest meal that tiger has ever seen."

Up the hill from the camels, the peacocks, the diseased emus, and the ram were the monkeys. At first the foreigners only saw the Monkey Prison - two females and a male begging for peanuts in a piss-soaked closet. Their indignation eased when they saw the entire environment. The monkeys had it better than the other animals. A dozen of them lived in a large pit with ladders, metal chains, and a tall rock formation. A young female sat at the top of the monkey mountain, eating a pink plastic bag. Cigarette butts strewn across the floor implied that the humans had enticed the monkeys to become fellow nicotine-addicts.

Other animals weren't so lucky. In neighboring cages, a lone wolf and a cheetah frantically ran circles, both obviously insane. Conway said a hippo had once lived in the zoo. It was long since dead, perhaps auctioned off as a delicacy to a high-end restaurant. Padraic danced with an incongruous plastic statue of a stegosaurus.

Conway understood about half of a loudspeaker announcement: "something something tiger, ten minutes." Young couples, children, mothers, and grandmothers gathered around a particularly large cage for the Tiger Show. While they waited for their hard-earned entertainment, a few adventurous young men made use of an unofficial attraction at the zoo, walking behind the four foreigners to take pictures. Padraic told Willie "Next time they come around, I will start grooming you." He didn't get the chance. The abrasive techno music returned, and the tiger show began!

A man led a young tiger on a metal leash into the enclosure. He hit it with a plastic stick, then forced the tiger into a different cage.The show was over. The crowd dispersed.

http://s7.zetaboards.com/PPooDD/topic/8412270/1/

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