I'm not sure whether it was my love of animals or my contempt for people that made spending a snowy pay-what-you-wish Wednesday afternoon at the Bronx Zoo a perfect yesterday. Most of my zoo memories come from the annual elementary school field trips to Scotch Plains' own Terry Lou Zoo, which was more like a North Korean animal prison than a refuge, at least until they shut the poor place down. A corpse-and-manure miasma permeated the entire zoo, as well as the surrounding neighborhood, and if I felt that Fanwood and Scotch Plains were confining, I have an unlimited reserve of sympathy for the Terry Lou elephant held in a cage slightly smaller than my dorm room.

Not that the zoo was really full of bad memories or anything; when you're in second grade, you're too impressed with the fact that you're feeding a giraffe to give a crap about animal cruelty. It's just that the Bronx Zoo animals seem less domesticated, like they haven't resigned themselves to being put on display in a lame New Jersey town. Some of the animals, like the gharials and tropical birds, weren't even behind plexiglass, and there was only a single thin wire and a ditch separating the humans from the Sumatran rhinoceros. Around closing time, I struck up a conversation with an ornithologist carrying a long, metal ornithology stick. It's always nice to have someone who can point things out to you: the male hornbill was regurgitating food for his chicks and the birds can be kept out in the open because they tend to fly toward the skylights in the ceiling and because they have no roosting areas and nowhere to land outside of their exhibit. Fascinating stuff. It's the type of place that makes you re-consider your career choice, until you realize that you'd probably make a pretty bad zoologist, considering how at one point in the day, you said to no one in particular, "Oh, my God, they're humping! Get the camera!"

And this seems like an appropriate time to address the gay penguin controversy at the Central Park Zoo. In my opinion, what two consenting adult sphenisciforms do on a fake glacier in front of hundreds of tourists too scared to travel to the Bronx is between them, their zookeeper, and God. If only we all were so lucky to find a penguin-for-life...

Besides, four words: hot lesbian penguin pair-bonding!

---

News flash: Al-Qaeda does not endorse Gay Penguin for president. Instead, as might be expected, Al-Qaeda endorses Bush.