Colchester Zoo Revisited

When I resided in Colchester, I was a regular visitor to their zoo, which is ranked highly in Europe. The Colchester Zoo of last night's dream would not even pass WAZA standards, let alone make it onto a leaderboard of any description. I was there with my friend, D, and one of his friends from Devon, with whom I was unacquainted. The first enclosure we encountered was a grimy, indoor compound of Lubetkin's Disinfectant Era legacy, a tiled compound with puddles of stagnant water and heaps of dirty hay. Inside were hippos of both species, common (hippopotamus amphibius) and pygmy (Choeropsis liberiensis). They could only be viewed by squatting in an uncomfortable position and peering through windows that looked as though they had not been washed in at least a decade. The common hippos were slumped in miserable heaps of flesh in the corner out of sight, snoozing their lives away. The pygmies were more active, but nonetheless lethargic in their movements as they monotonously munched straw.

Around the corner from the hippos was an old-fashioned Victorian cage resembling a giant bird cage with a ring on top, where an iron chain might be attached. The bird cage was made up of rusty iron bars with wide gaps between them, easily wide enough to admit an arm or a leg. Around the cave was a stone spiral staircase that led up and outside. Inside the cage there sprawled a number of resting ligers, the hybrid offspring of a lion and tiger. They were cramped into the tight space with barely room to turn around. Without a thought to his safety, D's friend put his arm through the bars and tried to stroke one of the beasts. I warned him to withdraw it immediately, which he fortunately did. We tramped up the staircase to an outdoor courtyard of more cages, though of larger dimensions that the oppressive liger cage. There seemed to be no clear indication as to how animals were being grouped.

One of the cages was all ugly wooden beams connected by rusty mesh through which the guests could view the animals. Inside were stunted Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) dragging their straw-ridden cloaks through the muck. Sharing the space with them was what an information sign claimed to be a dhole (Cuon alpinus), yet its hair was so matted and overgrown it could have been just about anything. A curious clacking sound attracted my companions over to another cage. I followed reluctantly, resigned to yet more squalid conditions. It was a bald ibis (Geronticus eremita) standing in a shallow pond and rattling its beak over and over. Its eyes were protruding and covered in a strange mesh of pulsing blue and pink veins. Eventually the ibis managed to dislodged one of these flaps of skin, pulling out the eyeball with it. which the ibis promptly swallowed. D's friend explained that the disease was caused by a 'crystallisation of unstable chromosomes.'