San Francisco Zoo - not sure I liked it!
Jasper and I went to San Francisco zoo last week, we had tried to go when James was with us but didn’t realise they closed at 5pm, so we made sure we were there well on time. Although we weren’t quite dressed totally appropriately for the San Francisco weather! It’s amazing how much it changes just from Santa Clara to San Francisco. So we arrived wearing jeans and t-shirts, and it was cold!! The first thing we saw was the gift shop!! Where we bought ourselves a couple of jumpers, a nice souvenir before we had even seen any animals!
We started with the African animals, Giraffes, Zebras, Ostrich and Orynx, it was quite amazing being able to see them. And Zebras do just look like they have been painted, it’s mad! From there we wandered round to the Gorillas, this was the first point at which I began to feel uneasy about the whole zoo thing. There were 5 gorillas in a fair sized area, but because of risk of attack to zoo visitors the area they were in was surrounded by a huge concrete wall. They basically lived in a concrete box, not exactly similar to their natural habitat. We moved on to look at lions, tigers, rhinos etc, and all of them just looked so sad and fed up. The big cats were all kept in enclosures no bigger than my lounge, I couldn’t understand how they could get away with keeping these huge naturally roaming animals in such a confined space. It just seemed so cruel.
When we first arrived at the zoo we were quite excited about seeing all the different animals, a lot of which we had never seen for real before. But by the time we left we just felt sad for the poor animals couped up in such small spaces.
All in all an amazing day, seeing kangaroos, penguins and tigers in the same place but it would have been nice to have seen them being treated right.
Big love, from a disheartened Fi
xxx