Sunday Afternoon at the Zoo, pt. 2

So, on to the zoo!

The first thing you see is this cool tower, promising vistas of Kingston all the way down to the harbor. Alas, it's closed because the stairs are falling off. Underneath the building to the left (also closed) was a cage area, housing some peacocks and parrots. See pic below.








Usually when zoos have have a critter on display, they tend to advertise its more positive aspects to the zoo-going crowd. In the case below, you instead get a sad tale of man's attempted manipulation of nature for the public betterment, gone horribly awry. Maybe the mongoose sign is an example of that famous Caribbean sarcasm, or maybe the story is told on purpose to accent the zoo's aura of industrial blight.

Pretty cute for a ravenous ecological catastrophe, eh?

About 40% of the cages were like this one. Overgrown and empty.

The other side of the wall below is not actually the end of the zoo. It's an abandoned exhibit reclaimed by jungle. Look close, and you can see a derelict animal shelter in back.

Here's a crocodile! I wasn't sure if it was real or not, because it didn't move a muscle for the whole time I watched it. But the zookeeper told me he was just saving his energy and trying to collect sunlight. I don't know if the water was brackish on purpose, or what the sign on the back wall used to say.

Later that same zookeeper took one of the Boas out of its cage to "give it exercise" which he says he does a few times a week. It was funny because I was alerted to this event by a half-dozen women and children dressed in bourgeois church finery, screaming and running across the lawn, down the hill and away from the snake. (They were the only Sunday zoo visitors besides myself.) When I walked past them to check things out, the kids were quite concerned: "Um,Excuse me! Mr! There's a really big snake over there! Mama, why dat man crazy!"

The zookeeper was nice enough, and knew some tricks to keep the snake coiled up and looking at me so I could get some good pics.

More zoo grounds.

Finally no dilapidated public Caribbean space is complete without an artifact from its colonial past. In this case it was an old sign, slowly corroding in the sultry air. It warns zoo-goers not to "stone" or "molest" the animals, or to face prosecution.

I feel genuinely bad for the people running Hope Zoo. No doubt they all love animals and are discouraged by the current state of things, but like everything else in Jamaica their efforts are crippled by a lack of revenue. The whole park speaks of an older period when British bureaucrats made funding decisions for the island, deciding that what Jamaicans needed most was a good dose of British civilization in the heart of their capital. Then after independence a new government is left to pay for the large, foreign artifact. Meanwhile, this new nation then inherits a slew of typical third-world issues such as trade imbalances, government corruption, and IMF debt. Such problems leave basic civic essentials like paved roads and law enforcement underfunded, never mind a late-Victorian park and zoo.