Zoo story

We had a lovely time at the zoo today. The Indira Gandhi Zoological park which is nestled in between the steeply rolling hills just outside Vishakapatnam. A superb location – this zoo is an open park with largely open enclosures nestled in wonderful scenery. We arrived just as it opened and thoroughly enjoyed exploring the animals with hardly another soul in sight.


Enoch spent most of the day running. He was always ahead of us. Every animal was something new and amazing for him.

And yet the old questions keep coming up. Is it right for these beautiful animals to be in enclosed areas. Some of the cages were clearly not what the animals are meant for.

Sheba was most upset by the sight of two huge bison rutting around a bucket, trying to lick something in it. It just seemed so wrong for an animal of such power and majesty to be rummaging like a stray cat.

Then again, for me the sight of a magnificent white tiger walking across open ground was awe-inspiring. The sheer majesty of muscle and sinew took my breath away. I also came away a little better informed - the signboard told me that white tigers were not albinos (as I had supposed) but rather an expression of a recessive gene.

The sheer blue of a peacock at close quarters remains in my mind. But the black grating of the enclosure also does. The wrongness of having animals cooped up is mirrored by the wrongness of having these magnificent animals killed ‘out there’ because they and their habitat are in the way of the ever widening human footprint. Even as we look at these animals - and the efforts of the park authorities to make at least a semblance of their original habitats - we sense an unease - a knowledge that all is not right.

Perhaps knowing that things are not right is itself worthwhile. We know things are not as they should be - and that points us to an ache in our heart that tells us that we were actually meant to be in a garden - actually meant to be living in harmony with the animals instead of in fear of them (or them in fear of us). The Bible opens with Adam and Eve in the garden - from which they were expelled - and we still feel the homelessness they did. It ends in a city - but nothing like the crude piles of excrement we call cities today - the new Jerusalem is a city of light and life - where the lion and the lamb are together - and where a river flows and a tree provides healing for the nations. That's where our home-sick hearts are yearning for. And that's where the picture of nature - even when framed in the bars of a zoo - points us to.