All Things Great and Small
Today, while wandering in the wilderness, I made a startling discovery.
Behold a new species of zebras, which I call zebrasses. They look just like ordinary zebras, except their heads look like asses and their asses look like heads. Here we see three of them in a rare gesture of delight, looking at the camera and waving their noses.
No, of course not.
I was on a field trip to the Singapore Zoological Gardens as part of the biodiversity module I'm taking. At first, I wasn't too enthusiastic about it, since I've always thought of zoos as nothing more than a popular excursion destination for schoolchildren. I was wrong; there's much to appreciate and ponder over at such places. All the more so when the Singapore Zoo has an open concept, with all but the deadliest animals kept in a naturalistic, cageless setting.
Where else in a city-state can you come close enough to ring-tailed lemurs to take a picture as fantastic as this?
No, of course not.
I was on a field trip to the Singapore Zoological Gardens as part of the biodiversity module I'm taking. At first, I wasn't too enthusiastic about it, since I've always thought of zoos as nothing more than a popular excursion destination for schoolchildren. I was wrong; there's much to appreciate and ponder over at such places. All the more so when the Singapore Zoo has an open concept, with all but the deadliest animals kept in a naturalistic, cageless setting.
Where else in a city-state can you come close enough to ring-tailed lemurs to take a picture as fantastic as this?
We saw the big cats (lions, tigers, jaguars, leopards); apes (orang-utans, chimpanzees, proboscis monkeys); camels, crocodiles, rhinos, wolves, elks, gnus, mousedeer, bears, sloths, butterflies and the interestingly-named gila monster (Gila is the place in Arizona where this lizard is found, but it also means 'crazy' in Malay), among others. Some were separated from visitors by moats and electrical wiring, others were given free rein to roam around.
Seeing such animals in the flesh is humbling and inspiring enough. But this experience was made even more meaningful by our professor and a colleague of his, who took great pains to point out the features these creatures possessed to adapt to their diverse habitats, as well as the symbiotic relationships among them. They also brought us to a forested area just outside the zoo to demonstrate how biologists measure biodiversity, collect specimens and classify them according to their taxonomic features.
One remark struck me rather deeply. While taking us through an orang-utan enclosure, the professor's colleague went on a spiel about apes, mentioning that "chimps are more aggressive; they are like humans". At that innocuous utterance, he and all my classmates suddenly lost their man-like qualities and appeared to me, for a brief moment, as just another ape species. I saw their likeness with their hairier relatives in the position of their facial features; their limbs; their gaits.
And the zoo suddenly ceased to be a series of exhibits, turning instead into a United Nations of the animal world convened to observe the most highly evolved organisms on the planet--the only form of life that makes tools to augment its physical limitations; the only form of life that creates and consumes for pleasure; the only form of life that, as far as we know, is capable of mental abstractions.
Things like this remind me that there is so much more to life and existence than the human mind is capable of apprehending at any one instant. It is already hard enough for us to remember that there are human societies beyond the ones we live in; it is even harder to remember that there is a natural world beyond all that--a world of life, processes and cycles larger than any political system, organised religion or human tradition.
As Icelandic singer Björk once said, when quizzed on her religious beliefs: "I believe in nature. It's 5,000 times stronger than us".
Seeing such animals in the flesh is humbling and inspiring enough. But this experience was made even more meaningful by our professor and a colleague of his, who took great pains to point out the features these creatures possessed to adapt to their diverse habitats, as well as the symbiotic relationships among them. They also brought us to a forested area just outside the zoo to demonstrate how biologists measure biodiversity, collect specimens and classify them according to their taxonomic features.
One remark struck me rather deeply. While taking us through an orang-utan enclosure, the professor's colleague went on a spiel about apes, mentioning that "chimps are more aggressive; they are like humans". At that innocuous utterance, he and all my classmates suddenly lost their man-like qualities and appeared to me, for a brief moment, as just another ape species. I saw their likeness with their hairier relatives in the position of their facial features; their limbs; their gaits.
And the zoo suddenly ceased to be a series of exhibits, turning instead into a United Nations of the animal world convened to observe the most highly evolved organisms on the planet--the only form of life that makes tools to augment its physical limitations; the only form of life that creates and consumes for pleasure; the only form of life that, as far as we know, is capable of mental abstractions.
Things like this remind me that there is so much more to life and existence than the human mind is capable of apprehending at any one instant. It is already hard enough for us to remember that there are human societies beyond the ones we live in; it is even harder to remember that there is a natural world beyond all that--a world of life, processes and cycles larger than any political system, organised religion or human tradition.
As Icelandic singer Björk once said, when quizzed on her religious beliefs: "I believe in nature. It's 5,000 times stronger than us".
posted by The Empty Signifier @ 2/20/2005 03:55:00 pm
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