The Zoo in Winter

I know people do think that animals think like us

and that the only reason why they don't talk to us

is because they have some sort of speech defect.

Really they are extremely eloquent.

They are desperately trying to get their message across to us

and their various noises are just in fact the noises made by a person

who is actually trying to say something complicated but can't get it out.

It's almost as if a dog's bark were...

HE MUMBLES AND BARKS IN FRUSTRATION

It's all like this, I can't get the...woof!

But in fact one knows that the main reason why animals don't talk to us at all

is that actually they have nothing to say.

# Something tells me it's all happening at the zoo

# I do believe it, I do believe it's true

# Mmmm, mmmm

# Whoa, whoa

# Mmmmm

# The monkeys stand for honesty

# Giraffes are insincere

# And the elephants are kindly

# But they're dumb

# Orang-utans are sceptical of changes in their cages

# And the zookeeper is very fond of rum

# Zebras are reactionaries

# Antelopes are missionaries

# Pigeons plot in secrecy

# And hamsters turn on frequently

# What a gas! You've got to come and see

# At the zoo

# At the zoo

# At the zoo

# At the zoo... #

ROARING

My earliest memories of the zoo are distant sounds heard in the early morning.

I'm very often woken by the sounds of these animals.

At about 5 or 6am, you could often hear extremely depressed sounds

coming from the lion house, for example.

Presumably, when there's no-one there to look at them

and no-one there to see them, they really let their hair down

because you can often hear the sounds of acute leonine depression

echoing over the empty park.

A sort of "Oh...God!"

DESPAIRING YOWL

GROANING

Or later on in the morning,

you can sometimes hear a tremendous shriek of hysterical laughter

as if a joke has been told somewhere in the small mammal house

which has been passed from cage to cage.

You get these ripples of hysterical laughter passing around all the enclosures.

It's as if perhaps a gerbil has heard a very small limerick

or an elephant joke,

and has passed it on to a skink and gradually by increments,

it grows and passes around the zoo

until the whole place is in an uproar of hysterical laughter

which you can hear across the empty park.

LAUGHTER BUILDS TO HYSTERICAL CRESCENDO

POLITE CLEARING OF THROAT

Quiet now, the public is coming in.

All along the canal here, there are these small bird cages, the owl cages.

I remember when I was a child,

I always regarded this as the dull hors d'oeuvre

of a visit to the zoo.

Somehow, these were the drab, uncoloured animals.

The English animals.

The home, domestic animals and they weren't very interesting at all.

They sat rather glumly on their perches with their large custard eyes looking out at one.

It was a part of the zoo to be hurried through en route

for the more dramatic things like the lions or the giraffes.

Just on the other side, I remember that in the early days,

they used to have all the giraffes.

In the giraffe enclosure, they had the hippos as well.

For a long time, I've been searching for the hippos and they've gone.

But there used to be a marvellous enclosure where they kept the hippos.

It was as if the hippos had invaded a waterworks

which had then been surrendered by the metropolitan borough council.

And said, "Right, the hippos are in, we'd better get out."

They used to be there steaming and stewing in a huge bouillabaisse of their own excrement.

There used to be these wonderful hissing, leaking noises.

That's all gone now. Instead, there is a decent, rather modern, chic, trendy enclosure now

where they keep the dromedaries, the giraffes and the llamas.

And these very dignified, beautiful, aristocratic creatures had to behave

as if they had not realised that next door,

there was this great stinking lavatory enclosure

with these half-deflated pink rubber bath animals.

What you get with these delicate high-stepping aristocrats here

pretending to say, "Don't notice a thing. Pretend it's not happening.

"Don't sniff now. This is a time of great vulgarity,

"and great raucousness and nothing makes me laugh nowadays.

"Occasionally..."

The sad thing about giraffes is that their appeal has been entirely destroyed

by the fact that art has imitated nature

and upholstery, having borrowed from them

in the most vulgar possible form, and now assumes that these animals

are as vulgar as the furniture which imitates them.

Gift suites are made up like giraffe and zebra skin.

So the giraffes and the zebras who invented the damn thing anyway have lost out.

"You see, the thing is, one starts with an idea,

"a design notion which is in itself quite good,

"then along comes a lot of these Times Furnishing, G plan,

"borrow the notion, vulgarise it and one is absolutely left in the sh...

"I think the zebras are, I hope I'm not speaking out of turn here,

"are more or less in the same position.

"You see, time was, the zebra had the whole striped field to himself,

"but the whole Op Art thing has burst and the result is the zebra

"is left looking very silly indeed with egg all over his face."

This is Przewalski's Horse, so-called.

I've always assumed since I became acquainted with this animal

that this, in fact, was a possessive description,

it in fact was Przewalski's Horse, who I have always assumed

was one of the marshals fighting against Napoleon at the Battle of Marengo.

And that finally, during the course of the battle, a cannon went off,

the animal was frightened, threw Przewalski, who broke his neck,

and after the battle, this horse went ranging through the battlefield of Marengo

picking its way amongst the corpses looking for Przewalski himself.

Who, unhorsed and epauletted, was himself saying...

-AUSTRIAN ACCENT:

-"Where is my horse, has anyone seen my horse?

"That is Przewalski's Horse. Has anyone seen Przewalski's Horse?

"Oh, for crying..."

The most peculiar thing about the zoo is that in a very small area,

right in the middle of very sober, business-like London,

you've collected together these...

all the most bizarre outrages of creation.

All the animals in this enclosure all smell very nice.

Whereas as soon as you get into any sort of carnivore

or a mixed diet house, there's a foul smell.

It's partly to do with the diet and the mortal attitudes of the animals as well.

MONKEYS HOOT

There is a feeling of sloppy, psychopathic delinquency about the monkey house.

They are careless about their toilet.

They defecate without shame and they masturbate without shame.

They pick each other, they fidget. They steal.

They take unfair advantage, they bite,

they snatch food through the bars.

They're rude. It's only in the monkey house

that one feels that you ever find yourself

using the terminology of blame.

You find yourself thinking that monkeys are immoral in some way.

They are naughty, or dirty.

They are sufficiently close to us to make us want to try to make them into us.

Therefore when they fail to come up to these standards,

we feel that they are delinquent in some way.

No-one thinks that polar bears are delinquent

because they don't dress properly or because they don't eat nicely.

No-one feels that lions or elephants or rhinoceroses are criminals,

but that is because they are so utterly different from us.

Their zoological distance is so enormous

that we apply no sort of value judgements to them at all.

But because monkeys are so close to us and look like us,

it's very natural to think of all their failures

to come up to our standards as being delinquencies of some sort.

It's very hard to know what to feel about monkeys.

And I think human beings have been ambivalent about the primates,

partly because they're so near to us and because they're so clever.

There's also a feeling they're too clever by half.

And there's a curious feeling amongst certain people,

certainly amongst certain writers,

that there's something awful about cleverness. You find it in Kipling.

One feels that if there was a Kingsley Amis or someone of that sort

writing about the animal world, he would also pick on the monkeys

as the sort of trendy lefties of zoology.

The too-clever-by-half intellectuals,

the people who are all talk and no action.

The chattering, talking intellectual figures of the animal world

who couldn't get anything done because they were always peeling grapes

and talking and chattering and trying to be clever.

The biggest crowds are always in front of the gorilla.

Everyone goes to see Guy first.

It's exactly the same way as our fascination with the moon

is very much greater than our fascination with the most distant stars in the universe.

I think in exactly the same way, we are fascinated by an animal

which is so close and yet at the same time so far.

We feel that we might be able to talk to Guy

or that Guy might be able to talk to us.

Therefore, his eternal failure to do so is somehow endlessly puzzling.

How can he look so much like us and yet not be able to talk to us?

We don't feel, as with a prisoner for example,

that underneath Guy's bedding

there is a huge pile of scrumpled notepaper

with a whole series of intriguing gorilla memoirs.

He has nothing to write about. One day is much like the next.

Our days pile up on each other and leave a residue.

Our years accumulate, and we sit on top of our pile of years,

and are higher up each year,

and can view our life from a mound of achievement.

Nothing builds up for Guy.

MONKEY HOOTS

It's a very weird attitude that we have towards animals in this way

and the way in which we project onto animals all our own feelings about human society.

There is a sort of fascist love of eagles

and of lions and of predators.

A sense that these are the Teutonic nobles of the animal world

who don't bother to think about ideas.

All they have is clean, simple actions.

I remember once visiting Apsley House

and seeing all the heavy military plate

and the tattered flags of old campaigns.

And I feel the eagle's house is rather like one of these military residences

where ancient generals can fall into honourable retirement.

There is something about eagles which is similar to military men and military aristocrats.

There's the dull, honourable grandeur

of the eagle's stance, the eagle's appearance,

the tattered magnificence,

the remains of some sort of military stature

which is falling into seedy decay.

As they stand on these damp perches and are fed

the remains of what might once have been a rather grand military meal.

I don't know whether it is intentional

but they have arranged the cage so it looks rather like Blenheim.

It's got a great central Palladian middle part for the golden eagle

and these two Palladian wings on each side.

They are grace and favour residences for people who once served the Crown with honour,

and have now been put into very honourable retirement.

The eagles are like old guards colonels,

who once had a good record at Alamein,

or like Roman generals who saw very honourable service at Lake Trasimene

and who have now been pensioned off into these magnificent shells of country houses

which their pension couldn't furnish, so there are no sideboards

and no magnificent chairs, no magnificent suites of furniture.

On a military pension, all they can do is keep up their uniform.

Here, one feels are the Alanbrookes, the Montgomerys,

the Hannibals, the Beetys,

the Jellicoes and the Caesars of the animal kingdom.

IT CAWS REPEATEDLY

In the first eight years of my visits to the zoo,

the various accessories, things like chocolates and gifts

and records were the main attraction of coming to the zoo.

The animals were something that were thrown in for good measure.

Now, bringing my own children to the zoo here in the '60s,

it's very much the same sort of thing.

As soon as you bring them along, all they really want is chocolate,

and you try and distract them with lions,

that lasts about a few seconds

and then it's chocolate they want, and to hell with the lions.

HE ROARS

I often imagine that the lions really

are rather like those slightly louche men you get in the circus

who dress up in lion's costumes,

who underneath their lion's costumes

are actually rather starveling figures, rather like Norman Wisdom.

With sleeked back, molten gramophone hair,

who simply have these enormous lion heads

which they screw on and then sit there.

I often imagine on Sunday morning before one comes in that they are sitting there,

crossed legs and lion's tail across their knee,

with the head off on a small side table beside them, smoking,

with these awful kipper-coloured fingers from smoking.

-COUGHING

-Reading The People.

And then quite suddenly, "Quick, here comes the public!"

COUGHING AND RETCHING

GROWLING

These animals here have always attracted a great deal of attention

because people are always fascinated by the delinquent aspect of the big cats.

There's a feeling that these are the master criminals of the animal world,

and they are the perpetrators of unspecified crimes of great magnitude in the past.

These are the man-eaters, the murderers,

and therefore in this rather grim reformatory here,

that these are the lifers of the zoo

who will never get remission for good conduct.

These are the ones who are in here for 30 years or 99 years and longer.

I don't know what wonderful whim suddenly seized

the designers of these enclosure here.

It's the most marvellous Gropius, Bauhaus idea.

In fact, these animals look like the steering committee of the Bauhaus

who've gathered to praise their own creation.

-GERMAN ACCENT:

-"We are here, all gathered by the pool side.

"Here is Moholy-Nagy, und Walter Gropius, und also Paul Klee,

"who have come in zeir dinner jackets

"to have a grand reception in which zey are deciding

"who is to have ze award for designing ze penguin pool.

"And zey are looking around und seeing it is magnificent.

"Oh, so sorry about that.

"Of course, what it also looks like is if this was a prize-winning design

"for a modernistic urinal."

The seals always frighten me in some ways

more than any of the animals in the zoo

because they sum up the whole ghastly loneliness of the animal world.

Just looking at these creatures swimming around in this icy, blue-green water,

you realise that they have got nowhere to go except outdoors.

There's no other place for them to warm themselves.

They've got nowhere to go indoors for a cup of tea.

They've got no future to look forward to, no evening,

no fireside to sit by, just the endless arctic wastes

where they come from, where there are no dates, no times,

no future and no past, just awful, endless, green infinity.

It's like those awful boys I used to see

coming out of municipal swimming baths

who'd been there for six hours, with frightful, chlorinated eyes.

And you realise that the only function of seals in nature

is to keep an eye on nature to make sure it's there.

It's like Bishop Berkeley's idea that if the world wasn't there to see it,

it wouldn't exist at all.

One feels that seals are the perceptual policeman of nature,

who just simply swim around scrutinising the world

to make sure that it continues to exist with their awful gluey eyes.

I think it's an awful life being a seal.

The elephants used to be housed in a nice Victorian enclosure

over the other side of the canal.

For some reason, they built this strange elephant Hilton about a year ago.

I think they must have taken their theme from Doctor Who,

on the basis that somehow the pachyderms were some sort of krotons or mechanical organisms.

The result is that they have this strange, faceless, roughcast concrete surface,

and this strange, mysterious door opens, a whirring sound is heard,

and suddenly out come these creatures from the jungle.

-ROBOTICALLY:

-"We are going to annihilate you."

TRUMPETS LIKE AN ELEPHANT

I think one of the strange things about elephants

is the way in which all the normal parts of a human being

or the normal parts of an animal are somehow there but misplaced.

Here, it has a distant mobile independent nostril.

It's lost its lower teeth,

and they've trans-migrated to the bottom of its feet

so it has its dentures in its toes.

He uses his nose as a hand and can wipe its face with its nostrils.

The other thing I keep thinking of when you see an animal this size,

and this opaque, with this sort of dull, thick surface,

is the idea of this fantastic physiological turmoil going on inside.

These are animals where you get the idea of complete futility of nature.

You realise that 16 out of 24 hours is spent eating just in order to maintain the size.

-GRUFF VOICE:

-"If only I could break out of it, I'd do it,

"but I can't, because I'm absolutely hamstrung.

"I feel such a Charlie with a nose down to my knees.

"Nostril on the move, morning, noon and night,

"just in order to keep hay shoved up my face.

"No, quite frankly, it's a dog's life.

"I've got no lower set of teeth, my jaw's collapsed...

"and what happens when you die?

"They just saw off your legs and turn them into umbrella stands.

"I feel like a bloody umbrella stand as it is."

With elephants and rhinoceroses, there's something so peculiar

about the tiny watery eye in the front of this enormous body,

that you begin to feel in fact, both rhinoceros and elephants

are operated by a very small animal located inside the head.

A small naked mahout who sits there prodding their tongue with an ankus.

In the zoo, you realise this pathetic asymmetry

of the relationships of the visitors to the animals.

You can talk till you're blue in the face to a rhinoceros

and you won't get anything back from him.

Look at the delicate, but rather sensitive, Anton Dolin hind legs,

and then these rubber leathery tights.

It's as unexpected to see blood on the face of a pachyderm

as it is to see blood coming out of a hoover or a railway engine or a taxi.

There's something so surrealist about a blood on a rhinoceros,

its own blood. It's like watching beds fighting. Two four posters.

-AS BOXING REFEREE:

-"On my right, at 485lb, a Chippendale.

"On my left, at 600lb, in unfair contest,

"a Hepplewhite double poster.

"May the best bed win."

I've only just discovered a few minutes ago

that rhinos make no noise at all.

One expects with creatures of this size that there would be an enormous baritone voice.

They've always been silent when I've been here.

The first time I ever heard them this morning,

making an extremely small falsetto squeak.

FALSETTO SQUEAK

-HIGH-PITCHED:

-"Hello. Hello, darling. Hello!"

It's quite ludicrous, it really is.

Oooh!

Well, this is the house where I always feel like the clockwork of nature

has run down to a very, very low level indeed.

It always makes me realise how very disturbed and upset human beings are

by seeing inertia, and how much they'll pay to see movement.

In fact, there's a nice economic illustration of that.

The way in which people can't bear to see animals or nature inert.

So they will throw their pennies in an effort to disturb the creatures,

to try and get them to perform some characteristic trick,

just as long as they move, something.

Just look at that fixed, malignant smile they have, too.

A sort of embalmed malice. Life going at a very slow pace indeed.

Frozen malice.

Just watch, for example, the way that crocodile can stand for hours,

leaving its mouth open.

If we haven't got anything to say, our mouths close.

But it's got stuck like that,

because the whole mental life is moving so slowly.

-MONOTONE AUSTRALIAN ACCENT:

-"There's no motive, so why close your mouth?

"If it's open, leave it open, I say.

"If it's closed, then let it remain closed. So I'm half-submerged.

"All right, fair enough."

I think it's quite possible that when you're an animal

the whole world is Australian.

It's the lazy way. It's also the way when you come from a very dry land

where everything moves very slowly and stickily,

and some of the animals are neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring.

In fact, in view of the total indifference of these animals,

it's rather touching that the zoo has gone to such expense

to build up this peculiar version of the animal's own habitat on the back walls.

It's all that South American nightclub decor they build up for the reptiles.

That sort of cha-cha-cha bongo drum feeling.

CHA-CHA MUSIC PLAYS

# Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha... #

The reptiles themselves don't live up to it at all.

It's "cha...cha...cha,

"we're having a heatwave, a tropical heatwave."

Where in human life would you get people lining up like this

with their feet in each other's faces?

You wouldn't get it in the House of Commons with people standing on top of one another,

simply because they couldn't be bothered to move.

-POSH VOICE:

-"I say, I wonder, Harold, if you'd mind shifting a little.

"Your very scaly foot is in my eye."

"I see no reason why it should be necessary for me to move my foot

"in view of the present situation as it stands."

In fact, most of these animals remind me how pleased I am to live in England.

There's a bland, easy, moderate quality about English animals.

Above all, they don't go round with these vicious, malignant sacks of poison

which happens with animals as soon as you move south of the equator.

Why is it the notion of poison is somehow so much more unsettling

than being killed by claws or teeth?

No-one likes the idea of being killed at all,

but somehow the idea of being killed by an animal with claws or teeth

is much less frightening

than the idea of being surreptitiously killed by one which injects its poison into you.

It's even reflected in the way in which the law regards the poisoner.

And the way in which the law punishes the poisoner more severely

than we punish the murderer who uses other weapons.

It's partly because poison shows how the whole act is premeditated,

So one feels that an animal which walks around with poison inside,

especially prepared and already distilled in sacks inside its head,

must already have malice aforethought.

So perhaps our horror of snakes is simply because

we feel that they themselves are distillations of undiluted malice.

Why else should they creep around

with this little vial of mischief inside their mouth?

By now, I suppose we all know now

that natural selection is what makes animals develop into

the various creatures that they have developed into.

And that mutations, one by one, occurring at random,

are gradually winnowed out by natural selection

and produce the enormous variety of the physical creation.

And that all seems very fine until you come to this house

and see birds like this.

It's very, very hard to imagine, I think,

that this sort of development,

that sort of nose, that sort of bill,

that sort of fantastic excrescence of horn on the top of one's head

is going to confer any sort of selective advantage on anyone.

Most of these animals look as if they've somehow been

looking for dog ends in a wastepaper basket,

which has got stuck on their face and they can't get it off.

And they're always rather peculiar wastepaper baskets.

They look like the sort of wastepaper baskets which you get in rather chic boutiques in Chelsea,

in rather trendy pastel colours.

And that the animal has been drawn to this,

and looking around for titbits in the bottom of the basket

has finally got his head stuck and can't get it out,

and all that remains are his eyes peering around each side

of this extraordinary basket. And they are howling for help.

There's this extraordinary, resonant, echoing voice

which comes from inside this horny container.

And that they are really asking for help to get out of it. "Help, help.

"Help. Help, get me out of this, someone."

HE SQUAWKS

Hello, hello.

Hello. BIRD CROAKS

Oh, did you hear that? It made a noise. Hello.

There is this tremendous impulse that people have

of trying to make animals talk to them.

Parrots, in fact, are the only animals in the world

which really play up to this tremendous human vanity

because they are whores, parrots.

And they'll, if poked and persuaded and paid,

they will play up to human vanity and talk back to human beings.

But again, always in this raucous, slightly drunken,

old-fashioned, 50-year-old, 1920 Beggars Opera sort of way.

"Hello, darling, how are you? Yeah, come on over.

-"Have a good time, ducky."

-HE SQUAWKS

-PARROT:

-Hello!

There's something very odd, I think, about the way in which these birds have been taught to speak.

It's almost as if human beings regard animals as an alter ego,

and particularly as a version of their more obscene selves.

The result is that birds somehow have always been taught

first of all to say slightly rude things,

or else they've been taught to swear,

or else they've been taught to use drink terminology.

Almost all the things birds say are things like,

"I don't mind if I do, I'll have a mild and bitter."

Or, "Bugger off," and so on and so on.

It's almost as if we do regard birds as sort of metaphors

of our darker selves.

What we do is walk into these houses and teach them the things

that we would like to be able to say to other people,

all the more animal instincts which we then project onto them.

These in fact are flying versions of our own subconscious, really.

It would be nice if one did walk in here

and hear the parrots with perfect elocution saying, "Hello.

"Here are one or two of Shakespeare's sonnets," really well modulated.

They say the wonderful thing you can do is teach parrots to talk,

but you can't teach parrots to do anything at all.

Parrots have got these appalling voices.

You can teach them to talk but you can't teach them to speak properly.

You can't say, "No, no, no, not hello, darling."

-MORE POSH:

-"Hello, darling."

-MORE COARSE:

-"Hello, darling."

It's always, "Hello, darling."

The other thing which must be very peculiar indeed for a parrot,

or for any bird as bright as this,

must be to have this brilliant cosmetic appearance to your face

which you can't ever take off.

It'll never run if you cry, never smear if you go out in the rain,

but the fact is you can't alter your make-up from start to finish of your life.

These animals are fixed in this gaudy appearance

for the full length of their natural lifespan.

And there's a curious sort of tragedy about that for them.

They are the most marvellously brilliant colours,

but they can't change them.

What's awful about parrots, present company excepted,

is the awful monotony of a parrot's mind.

It's that... All they can think to say is, "Hello."

"Er...hello."

"Hello."

"Hello."

Also, there's the a feeling of them being minor Australian actresses

living in the Earls Court Road, waking up in the morning.

So much... "Hello."

-AUSTRALIAN ACCENT:

-"A bit red round the eyes.

"Hello.

"Blue liner."

"Oh, Christ. Got a tissue, darling?"

"Right, that'll do."

"That's better.

"Well, I feel just about ready to face the day. Hello."

PARROT: Hello. Hello.

I think what's very nice about flamingos, that extraordinary colour they have,

that slightly gaudy tint all over them.

Well it wasn't until about a year ago that I discovered

this colour has to be maintained by diet.

There's a can down in the front of the enclosure there,

which every now and then they walk rather quietly over to.

They take a mouthful that goes rather lumpily down their long necks.

In fact, that diet is a special diet of shrimps,

which has to be kept up in order to maintain this pink tint.

And if they didn't have this shrimp diet daily,

this flamingo scampi,

they would become unspectacular and off-white.

"Oh. It's going a bit, isn't it?

"Another dose of the scampi, I think."

HE GULPS

"Does your mouth good."

This is the backstage of the aquarium.

It stands as a sort of metaphor of the world in some way.

And there must be some view of our life

where you can see human beings and animals from a view

where it was never intended that they should be seen at all.

It's like it's described in Little Dorrit.

There's a wonderful description there of the backstage

of a theatre in the 1850s,

in which Dickens describes it as being

the sort of seamy side of the universe,

with bits and pieces of scenery and odd bits of lamps and wires,

where the whole thing didn't hang together properly

because it was not a view, it wasn't the side of the universe

from which things were meant to be viewed.

And I always feel this is very much like the aquarium is,

seen from this angle.

This is the first time I've ever seen the aquarium from the top here.

It's always been something down below.

And it's always been sealed off and illuminated from the correct angle.

It's really rather like seeing,

in some ways it's rather like going backstage at The Talk Of The Town.

You can see all these chorus girls chattering

and putting on their make-up before rushing on

and appearing before the public out there, who are invisible to us.

I think there are two things I like about the fish.

One of the things is the fact that they are sealed

in a separate medium from us.

And therefore that they are completely silent.

One never gets the impression that fishes are acting with enormous restraint

and that they could have a tale to tell if they put their mind to it.

You have a feeling that fish are primevally silent.

That they have nothing to say.

And that their entire animal energy is put into their appearance.

The other thing which I like about fish is the fact that

they live in this completely independent medium from us.

This quivering, quicksilver roof,

through which they can poke their snout.

But they seem to be pushed backwards into their own medium again,

and they die when they come out of it and we die when we go into it.

In some ways, it's the same sort of puzzle we get

about the separation between the world of the dead and the living.

There are two ways of viewing fish.

Fish, when seen from above, from our world.

And fish when seen from underwater like this.

When the medium itself is invisible.

It is a very frightening fish,

it's got that Captain Nemo, Nautilus feeling about it.

The wonderful thing about fish

is they are the most primitive of all the vertebrates.

And therefore you get this highly simplified, harmonic motion.

Once creatures get up onto land and get four limbs,

the movements are more complicated

because of the movement of the limbs.

Here, all you have is the simple, harmonic motion of a spine.

This is the moray eel.

I always think turtles are very peculiar.

It's like watching animals... I'm thinking of turtle soup.

Somehow seeing turtles afloat like this,

it's like watching an animal which is already boxed in its own terrine.

It's like those Christmas puddings you get from Fortnum's,

where they come actually in the bowl that you are going to eat it out of.

I really have a curious, snobbish feeling

that the animals of the Mediterranean

and all waters south of a line, say from the Bay of Biscay,

a sort of indescribable vulgarity

sweeps over the animal world at that point.

I always regard a tropical fish as a tremendous...

It's a mixture of dentist's waiting rooms, the entrance to nightclub lounges.

They always seem to me to be like vulgar chinoiserie.

Sort of little ivory ornaments which people collect.

Nouveau riche, or Nouveau fish.

It's almost as if nature has somehow forgotten her tact

and taste south of the Tropic of Capricorn.

These things here, these angelfish. Odious little spivs.

Little parvenus of the animal world.

They get dressed up in awful Carmen Miranda clothes.

They play maracas, they wear loud make-up

and dance very vulgar dances.

And exist in a hot, flea-ridden, malaria-ridden, dysentery-ridden,

noisy, vulgar world of sort of nightclub hostesses.

Whereas up in the North,

there's a sort of dignified sobriety about the fish.

The water is cool, it doesn't overheat the senses,

it doesn't produce nasty, lewd ideas.

And the result is that these very tweedy, neat,

sober fish ride around in the Atlantic swell,

with never a raucous thought to disturb their sobriety.

And that's what I like about them.

I like the cod, the dench, the rudd.

All firm, 18th century, squire-ish names.

And all the animals themselves dressed in very good,

squire-ish tweeds and no-nonsense. And they usually face the same way.

They are quite honestly called the bleak, European fresh waters.

"Yes, I'm bleak and proud of it."

"I'm moving in decent, cold waters

"that are flushed at least four times a day.

"All facing the same way.

"Together, chaps.

"Tremendous team spirit."

The same thing goes for the North American fish.

While they have a sort of Yankee decency,

they come from Massachusetts, one feels.

There's no nonsense, they dress at Brooks Brothers

and do not wear gaudy clothes.

-BOSTON ACCENT:

-"Well, hi there. We're from Massachusetts, actually."

Whereas if you go into the tropical hall, there is a sort of mad,

wild, undisciplined, raucous individualism,

as opposed to the quiet, disciplined, English manners

of the northern fish. And I applaud that.

One of the things that strikes me about animals,

when you stand outside enclosures,

if you stand for a length of time and just simply watch the animals

just wading around in their cold water...

I mean, these in particular.

It's how featureless the timetable of animals is.

Our day is divided up into things like breakfast time, lunchtime,

we have engagements and appointments.

We have dinner time and we go to sleep. And we have a calendar.

The year is divided up into, er,

strange, regular features of one sort or another.

But I think if you watch animals...

there's a desolate, featureless quality about their day

which is a very reproving experience for humans to watch.

Just watch these animals. All they do, they move their wings, they eat.

There's no particular time for eating,

you spread the eating out through the day,

you spread the walking out through the day.

You walk around in the cold water, you eat a shrimp or two.

Then the night comes down.

Often if you come here in the evening when the dark is falling,

the animals are still doing exactly the same thing

that they would have been doing in the bright sunlight earlier.

You can recognise what humans do at each time of the day.

You can recognise the time of day according to our behaviour,

but you can't do this with animals at all.

It's the monotony of the animal's life.

They haven't got a calendar or a timetable,

which I think makes them so different from us.

They haven't got a history either, and that's very peculiar, I think.

One doesn't feel that they grow old at all.

They just simply reach their maturity, walk around,

stretch their wings, eat shrimps, then die.

BELL RINGS

'The zoo is now closing and visitors are requested to leave immediately.

'Visitors who wish to travel by the 74 bus

'for Camden Town Hall, Baker Street should leave by the north gate.

'For the 3 and 53 buses to the West End, the south or main gates.

'North gate, 74 bus,

'south and main, 3 and 53 buses. Good night.'

HOWLING

I think there are several reasons why society needs zoos.

If we confront ourselves face-to-face as human beings,

it's often very difficult to realise quite how human we are.

Whereas if we concentrate all the animal world into one place

and fasten them into little enclosures like this,

where we can watch them behaving in their reduced, rather primitive, simple, instinctive animal way,

our own humanity is emphasised,

and we can emerge from the zoo with a sense of human pride

and a sense that we're something special.

Distinctions and extraordinary achievements

which animals could never aspire to.

It's rather the same way that if prisons didn't exist,

it would be extremely hard for ordinary citizens to feel that

they were as virtuous as they would like to be.

If wrongdoers were mingled at large with the rest of the community,

one might even feel that one might in fact oneself be a miscreant or wrongdoer.

But by having all the wrongdoers confined in special places

set apart for them, you can feel by contrast and by comparison,

everything that's outside must be virtuous.

In exactly the same way, by confining all the lower orders

of creation to one fixed place, we can feel that everything outside

must therefore be lords of creation,

which testify to our own, whizzing, superb humanity.

But it's a spurious sense of our own superiority

we get by looking at these simple cages and domestic enclosures.

Whereas a species, human beings are a very bad lookout.

Of all the species, we're the only ones who systematically persecute and torment each other.

I suppose animals can be ferocious and wild and stupid and silent,

but they never torment each other in the way that we do.

At least they don't set up systematic engines of torment.

It's not that I wish I were a penguin or a seal

or a tiger or a parrot or a fish, I don't.

I'm very pleased to be dressed here in the clothes that I'm wearing,

with appointments to keep and things to do and diaries to look at

and people to worry about, and even a destiny of sorts.

Perhaps that's the difference.

This feeling that animals have no destiny and no history.

Each of their days is much like the rest.

Whereas when I go away from here,

their day is going to be very much the same as it was before when I came in here.

No appointments to keep, no diaries to look at.

There isn't a destiny to realise.

# Orang-utans are sceptical of changes in their cages

# And the zookeeper is very fond of rum

# Zebras are reactionaries

# Antelopes are missionaries

# Pigeons plot in secrecy

# And hamsters turn on frequently

# What a gas! You have to come and see at the zoo

# At the zoo

# At the zoo

# At the zoo. #

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