Animal House (とべ動物園)

Happy Autumn Equinox Day!!!

Since yesterday marked yet another seemingly random Japanese national holiday, I had the day off. SCORE! With no grand plans in mind, I headed off to the Tobe Zoo. Tobe is a town neighboring Matsuyama City and is famous for its zoo and also its pottery (known as tobe-yaki in Japanese).

The Tobe Zoo is a pretty popular tourist attraction here in Ehime Prefecture. In fact, one of the adult students in my faculty class was telling me how her children love visiting the place to see the giant hippo. She recommended I go. Indeed, the Tobe Zoo seems to be the amusement area of choice for the average Ehime family. I can safely report that there were no fewer than 10 billion children screaming, laughing, crying, and running amuck inside the zoo grounds.

While I have only been to a few zoos in Japan, I have yet to leave the experience without harboring a feeling of general uneasiness. One of the main aspects that bothered me about the Tobe Zoo (it was the same at the bear habitat I visited in Hokkaido) was the feeding / performance aspect.

Since animal food dispensing vending machines are located throughout the zoo, the whole idea is that patrons will buy bread / chips / fish etc. and chuck it at the animals as they beg for food. I didn’t know tree monkeys in the wild ate curried rice chips. Half the time the food doesn’t even make it in the cage due to bad aiming on the part of the gawking visitors. In these cases, you’ve just effectively taunted and teased the animal. I’m sure that’s great for the psyche.

While I am by no means a veterinarian, several of the animals also looked sickly and malnutritioned. I felt sad when I saw the matted coat of the orangutan, the rotting tusks of the elephants, and one very skinny gazelle with its ribs protruding.

While it is always fun to point at your favorite critters and snap pictures of all the animals, there is something about Japanese zoos that doesn’t mesh well with my sense of kindness towards animals. I suppose one could easily argue that any zoo, no matter the location, is cruel and unnatural for wild animals.

Maybe I’m bringing too much of my foreign (Western) mindset to the experience. I don’t know. I mean, the tons of Japanese families at the park seemed to be having a simply great time chucking chips at the monkeys.

B.E.W.