This is not exactly a new idea of mine. I was a teen when it first hit me that what my riparian community desperately needed — besides shoes and fire — was a municipal zoo.
Of course, back then, in the 1960s, there were like eight people calling the Santa Clarita Valley home and a zoo would have been minimalist, housing, like, a horse and a tarantula. I’d type in, “… dwelling in separate cages,” but that’s unnecessary. Horses and tarantulas live together in the wild in harmony already. So? My zoo back then would be somewhat designed along the honor system. No cages. No parking. No annoying staff and signs warning, “Please Don’t Dangle Toddlers Over The Starving Albeit Angry Mountain Lion Enclosure.”
Which leads me to current events.
Just read from Associated Press that a Denmark zoo is looking for its kind-hearted socialist citizens to donate their unwanted pets as hors d’oeuvres for their four-legged meat-eating inmates.
“In zoos we have a responsibility to imitate the natural food chain of the animals — in terms of both animal welfare and professional integrity,” the Aalborg Zoo said in a recently released statement. Aalborg was founded in 1935 and keeps 1,500 animals belonging to 126 species, including tigers and lions and bears — sing it with me — oh my!
Of course, that pesky animal-loving social media crowd took umbrage. Some thought it barbaric, immoral, cruel and blood-curdling. I’ve had some run-ins with pets over the years and, pray PETA isn’t reading, but I could see donating a dog to Velociraptor Aid International as an aperitif.
“Buster, you mutt. You pee on my grandmama’s Persian rug one more time and I swear I’m going to drive out to Oxnard and use you as chum,” I’ve said on more than one occasion.
Buster, who watched far too much television and that’s partly my fault, would just tilt his head to the left and, Scooby-Doo style, reply, “Roh-ohh …”
We had a horse named Faustus. If that doesn’t scream, “Deadly Widow-Maker Rodeo Stock” I don’t know what does. Worse? Yet more apropos? Faustus was a mare. I was coming back from riding fence one summer day and had been out hours. Faustus and I were pretty much pooped. Out stables back then consisted of this neat long row of adobe horsey houses with a Spanish tile roof. I’m high in the saddle, riding Faustus under a 9-foot-tall ceiling and after an afternoon of perfect behavior, she’s inspired to go full-rodeo and bucks like she’s going to collect the $250 for throwing me off.
Strange thing with rodeo animals. They get paid, no matter if you’re on for the 8 seconds or not.
I was placed in the undignified position of having to crouch in the saddle so I wouldn’t compress all my vertebrae on the low-hanging ceiling.
This. Was not. Funny.
Unfortunately, we did not have a Donate Your Unruly Farm Animals To The Zoos, Newhall-Saugus chapter. (There wasn’t Canyon Country then.) I would have called with two questions: 1) “Do you guys pick up?” and b) “Can I trade you this dogfood cheeseburger of a horse for an aardvark?” Neither currently, nor back then, did I have any use for aardvarks, but, I’d trust an aardvark more wandering the acreage than Faustus, who had emotional issues.
Back to the Denmark zoo and its request for pets. I’m not clear if the pet you donate as a sloth bear’s brunch has to be your pet or someone else’s pet. My longtime neighbor and childhood galpal, Chris Allensworth, had this annoying little champagne-colored 3-pound yapper dog called Archie. Well. That’s what Chrissy and her daughters called him. I called Archie other things. I’m still smiling in dear sweet daydream, seeing a 1948 panel truck with the bold, red, non-serifed lettering on the sides, “Newhall Unwanted Pet Retrieval Service,” pulling up our dirt road. The driver, a hunchback with a serious smoker’s cough, gets out and asks:
“You Archie’s owner?”
I fake-sneeze into my hands and nod, which isn’t technically lying.
I hand the driver a paper bag with something small struggling inside and, poof. Off Archie goes, to Placerita Nature Center to feed the Caged Owls. Good name for a bad but angry Golden Valley High garage band.
I don’t understand those people from the Land of Hamlet. Way back in 2014, the Copenhagen Zoo put out contract on a perfectly good healthy giraffe and fed it to the lions three doors down.
I can just hear the giraffe’s last words as it’s being led away: “BUT I DIDN’T DO NOTHIN’!!”
The one I truly don’t understand was that the same zoo staff offed four healthy lions — two adults, two kids — because they had acquired a new male lion who had this hot rod biker attitude and they were afraid the alpha mega-kitty wouldn’t take kindly to the other four and kill them.
Those Danes. Forever dystopian.
If we ever do get our Downtown Newhall Community Zoo, I couldn’t see them advertising to locals for donations of beloved pets. After all. What would all the coyotes eat?
Next step? In the “Lion King” Circle Of Life theme, what about unwanted relatives? I’m not one to name names, but I’ve had some brothers-in-law I wouldn’t mind seeing fed to wild animals, even cows if cows would have them. Of course, they probably feel the same way about me.
The brothers-in-law.
Not the cows.
All kidding aside, I’m pro-critter. I’ve been known to pet dogs and nod at cats with a flat and disinterested, “Hey how’s it goin.’” Swimming laps the other day, I took a flipper and rescued a bee from drowning. Didn’t even think of mailing it to some anteater in a faraway Scandinavian country.
Although, question?
Do anteaters eat bees?
And, if so, wouldn’t that make them — beeeaters?
With more than 100 writing awards, Santa Clarita’s John Boston is Earth’s most prolific humorist and satirist. Look for “Naked Came the Novelist” Boston’s long-awaited sequel to “Naked Came the Sasquatch, coming this fall on johnboston-books.com.
