It was the baby's first birthday and, to celebrate the occasion, we thought we'd bring her to the Zoo. This seemed like a reasonable thing to do with a year-old baby; but, if you've ever had one yourself, you'll know that we could have taken her to the Chester Beatty Library of Oriental Art and it would have been all the same to her.
It would have been better, in fact. At least there, her interest might have been sustained by the possibility that she'd get to eat some of the ancient manuscripts. Instead, notwithstanding the fact that her main interests in life are paper-chewing and advanced dirt studies, we brought her to the Zoo. To see the animals.
Near the end of the visit, we came to the giraffe enclosure. Here at last, we thought, was something dramatic enough to hold the attention of a 12-month-old for at least a couple of seconds. I was excited myself. "Look! A giraffe!" I said, pointing at the world's tallest animal with a lolly-pop stick I happened to have in my hand.
The baby's eyes followed my arm until they got as far as my hand, and then she looked back at me, puzzled. "What?" her expression was saying. "It's only a lolly-pop stick." After that I gave up.
I couldn't remember when I'd last been in the Zoo, but it was definitely a long time ago. It was probably on a primary school tour (I have a vague recollection of being pecked while trying to feed the dodos), so the place had changed quite a bit in the interim.
The polar bears have a lot more room, for one thing. It's not exactly Kingdom of the Ice Bear and they still look embarrassed by all the grass, but it's certainly better than it was. You could tell the bears were happier, too - instead of pacing back and forth, as they used to, they were doing nothing at all. This is what animals in the wild do most of the time: they just lie around, conserving their energies for those vital times when David Attenborough shows up.
The thing that absolutely hadn't changed since my last visit was the orang-utan enclosure. Maybe the enclosure itself had changed, but the family tableau was exactly as I remembered it: the put-upon female sitting in the foreground cradling a baby and looking like she had no idea where the next meal would come from, the much larger male slouching at the other end of the enclosure trying out different shoulder hunches.
So human are the orang-utans' facial expressions that, watching them, you can't help being humbled. Everybody's response is a personal one, but when I looked at that big male ape sitting there scratching himself and grunting occasionally, I couldn't help seeing a guy racking his brain for something, anything, to write about in this week's column. Uncannily, my wife saw the same thing.
The orang-utan is a threatened species, of course, and one of the arguments for still having zoos is the important role they play in breeding. That said, the only breeding we saw during our visit involved two smaller monkeys (of the exhibitionist family), who weren't threatened at all but didn't need an excuse. It was the one time I was grateful my daughter had no interest in what was going on.
Another of the zoo's endangered species is the tiger, which is under threat partly because of its chronic overuse as a metaphor for Ireland's economic success. And it never ceases to fascinate me, whether watching on television or in the flesh, how alike the tiger is to its cousin-in-reduced-circumstances, the domestic cat. Specifically our neighbour's cat, which is still trying to move in with us, but has been a (frequently) threatened species since it crashed though our patio roof while jumping from the bathroom window sill last year.
A GENERAL RULE of zoos is that the larger and more potentially interesting an animal, the less likely it is to make a discernible movement while you're watching it. So, it's not just 12-month-old children who sometimes find themselves underwhelmed by the action. Full-grown adults will do silly things to make the animals react; leading to an ironic situation where - in the gorilla enclosure, for instance - the exhibits often get more entertainment than the visitors.
Wildlife programmes are partly to blame for this, with their animal-interest story lines in which everything is a drama. I remember one on the National Geographic channel last year which was a classic of the genre. It was about a group of hunting lions (or rather, lionesses: the male lion doesn't do much hunting - he finds it ruins his mane), and the threats that they in turn face from other wildlife.
One of the lionesses (the narrator called her Leah but you knew this wasn't her real name) injured her leg in a fight, and the cameras followed her fate as, despite the attempts of the other lionesses to protect her, the merciless hyenas closed in. It was painful to watch (the fact that the hyenas were laughing just made it worse).
Then, suddenly, the hyenas backed off. Deterred by some subtle instinct, or by the National Geographic's film crew shooing them away, they retreated. And, like many viewers, I sighed with relief as the narrator announced that, this time, Leah had survived. Of course, we knew perfectly well that, as far as the hyenas were concerned, she was tomorrow's packed lunch; but at least it would be off-camera.
You won't see anything that dramatic at the Zoo, but what you will see is an incredible number of other people and their children. It was the survival of the fittest around those narrow pathways last Sunday: everywhere I turned there seemed to be even bigger fathers looking at me like I was part of the food chain.
So, if you're thinking of heading to the Phoenix Park this weekend, be warned: it's a jungle out there. I think we'll try the Chester Beatty Library.
