Edinburgh Zoo

It was a clear sunny morning when we set out for the zoo and I must say that perhaps that’s the reason we enjoyed it all the more. Imagine walking in the sun in an air-conditioned environment having on either side great expanses of green lawns, clumps of trees here and there and some well settled and well fed animals. We reached early to beat the rush and consequently had the place quite to ourselves for most of the time.

I must say that this place is exactly how Vandalur Zoo is in Chennai and I think our zoo has more variety in the range of animals kept there than here. Having said that let me also tell you, that it’s always a big kick to see leopards, lions and jaguars. One important thing I learnt is that there is no black panther as such it is just a common name used for Jaguars who are black. That’s like humans having a fair baby and a dark baby and well the jaguars do too so the dark one is often referred to as a black panther.

I felt amazingly good when I saw a board here in the zoo which mentioned different names of the lion and on it was the Hindi name, Gujarati name of lions and so on. Well the day is not far, my friend, when we have people of Indian origin ruling the different countries in the world.

The penguin enclosure was the best and I saw two varieties of penguins, one was the common one with black and white colouring and the other was the one with black, white and yellow colouring. There were an amazing number of penguins kept and when we reached it looked as if everyone had just finished their morning bath and was sunbathing!!

Quite a few of the animals refused to come out to say hi coz they were busy sleeping, 10 am seems to be too early in the morning for these guys. Especially the big cats, they were either sleeping and snoring away to glory or all grumpy as in just woke up mode. :)

The monkeys and the birds were all awake though and completely engaged in entertaining themselves. We saw an area where the monkeys were interviewed it sort of looked like the interrogation room of police headquarters in all those English movies. There are studies conducted here on the animals in the zoo however the zoo is quick to reassure us that these are just behavioural studies and no animal torture is done.

There was a type of monkey's called the squirrel monkey's which even full grown were about as big as a squirrel, looked quite cute i thought. :)

There was also a lot of boards and information given out on how some of the species were nearing extinction and they were protected species. The Zoo also conducted educational tours on how humans should help these animals overcome extinction. I cant imagine some of these beautiful ones being just a label or a drawing in science books, I hope we can keep them alive, it would be a shame otherwise.

I came across this sign while at the zoo. Quite spiritual and touching, if only we, as in the entire human race, would just heed to this message, perhaps the world might be a better place to live in, would it not?