Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins

that curtailed Plucky's customary epistles to his pals. So startling, in fact, that had Ziller an inkling of it he might have been too amazed to have balled his bride on that gray Skagit afternoon, let alone to have proposed the Babylonain slobber magic which they practiced after supper.
    No. The author exaggerates. It wasn't as startling as all that.
    Amanda went once to a blues club. Her date was Madame Lincoln Rose Goody, who was, as Amanda somewhat innocently discovered, not academic in bed.
    All evening, music or no, an old Negro called the Jelly Man passed among the patrons selling from a tray fresh raspberries, sugar, glass jars and little brown spiders.
    “Jelly Man,” said Amanda, “I can understand the berries and the sugar and the jars. But how did the spiders get in?”
    “Under the door,” answered the benevolent Jelly Man.
    They had two garter snakes and a tsetse fly. And the tsetse fly was not even alive. Hardly a roadside attraction.
    They had a baboon, true enough. But under no circumstances would Ziller assign Mon Cul a role in the menagerie. “As long as my friend's body turns on a pivot of crimson buttocks, as long as his eloquent fangs pierce honeydews and melons, as long as he in wisdom and laughter goes on spinning around the sun, he will not be gawked at, gibbered over and goaded by beings less dignified than he.”
    Ziller's attitude was understood perfectly by Amanda for she had brought her dancing bear to perform with the Indo-Tibetan Circus only to have it choke to death on a handkerchief that some rube in sport tossed into the pen. “But,” she answered, “granting that Mon Cul is a remarkable creature, that he is the elder statesman among monkeys, that his marcescent eyelids have opened upon sights and splendors about which the most romantic among us only dream, granting that, do not all wild animals have dignity? Can we justify caging
any
beast, subjecting it to the public gape?”
    After some hesitation, John Paul agreed that they could not. He hesitated because he was, after all, a man of the jungle; a man dressed in hides and feathers, a man who had hunted and been hunted in lands where primitive equalities prevail. It was not in Africa (or in India), however, but at the Bronx Zoo that he had been warned of the folly of anthropomorphism. That wolf that paces incessantly in its cage, that panther who sways as if to music behind the metal barricades, we tend to think them unhappy, angry, claustrophobic, in despair because of their confinement, but we're just imposing our own human emotions on animals who are not biologically capable of such feelings. That's what the keeper had said. The soft brown eye-glow of the deer looks sad to us, but that's just the way deer's eyes are built. There are no sad deer, in or out of corrals. Anthropomorphism is a silly deceit. He'd said that, too. Furthermore, he'd claimed that animals are better off in zoos than in their natural habitats. In the wilds, the battle for survival is unrelenting. Hunger follows the animal like a shadow. Thousands of beasts starve each year the world over. What's more, there are predators to escape. And diseases. In the zoo, an animal is safe, well-fed, housed in comfortable temperatures, given medical attention. Why, zoos are almost utopias for the beasts.
    It was a good argument, yet John Paul offered it to Amanda with a minimum of conviction, and when she rejected it he concurred. As unrefined and basic as an animal's emotional equipment may be, it is not insensitive to freedom. Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable. In the cage, even in the “environmental parks” which the better zoos are providing for their charges, a creature is out of harmony with the natural rhythms of organ and earth: it must eat foods out of their regular season; soft living erodes its cunning; it becomes confused about mating and often fails