My Point...And I Do Have One

this same page every day for a month and think, “That’s odd. Every time I read this page, Ellen says she went to the zoo. That means she’s gone to the zoo every day for thirty days in a row. Boy, she must really like the zoo. Come to think of it, I must really like this page. I mean, why else would I be reading it every day for a month? I either like this page a lot or I’m going insane. Maybe I should see a doctor. Maybe I already have seen a doctor. I’m hungry. I think I’ll fix myself a sandwich.”
    Anyway, at the zoo they’re very proud about how they’ve managed to re-create the animal’s natural habitat. I’m not exactly sure who “they” are. I just know that “they” hang around the zoo, wear funny hats, and tell everyone how proud “they” are that the zoo has re-created the animal’s natural habitat. And, I must admit, the zoo hasdone a great job. I’m sure I’ve seen in those Jane Goodall chimpanzee documentaries plenty of tires on ropes swinging from trees in the jungle. And who can visualize a pride of lions on the Serengeti without imagining cages, moats, and little kids throwing marshmallows at the lions? I know I can’t. Also, most animals get real ornery if they don’t smell cotton candy, the natural odor of the wild.
    You’ve got to wonder what the animals think in a zoo. The first day at school is bad enough; imagine your first day in a zoo. All these strange species staring at you, and you’re saying, “What are they looking at? Is there something on my lip? Hey, you see I’m locked up; get me out of here!” I’m sure some animals go crazy in captivity and crack. “Hey, it wasn’t me. It was some other polar bear who looked like me. Let me out and I’ll help you find him and we can beat the crap out of him.”
    A lot of times at the zoo you see the monkeys throwing their own poop. I don’t blame them. It must be so boring in there, you’ve got to do something to entertain yourself. I mean all that’s there is a tire, a tree, and a few bananas. If I were in the zoo, I’m sure eventually I’d be throwing my poop. (I’m misquoted so often in the press that I’m sure this will be the one paragraph taken out of context in the reviews of this book. The headline will probably be. ELLEN WANTS TO THROW HER OWN POOP. Oh, well.)
    I bet they get sick of the food they’re served, too. I can just imagine some monkey saying, “Man, they see us eating bananas once and they figure that’s
all
we want to eat. Geez, would it kill them to give us some Chee-tos, a ham sandwich, or some cotton candy?”
    It makes me especially sad to see dolphins in captivity, because they are such incredibly smart animals. That doesn’t mean that I’d want a dolphin to perform brain surgery on me. It has less to do with intelligence than one, I don’t want anyone performing brain surgery on me andtwo, dolphins don’t have any hands. It is very hard to hold a scalpel in flippers—as, I believe, Benjamin Franklin once said. Benjamin Franklin, by the way, wanted to make the dolphin the national bird of the United States, that is until he was told that the dolphin is an aquatic mammal and not a bird. He tried to cover his faux pas by quickly suggesting the turkey instead. But by that time, everyone else had voted for the eagle, mainly because it was already on the back of the quarter.
    But getting back to my original point, dolphins are incredibly intelligent. They have a highly developed cerebellum, are able to learn complex tasks, and have been known to help swimmers in distress. So what do we do to reward this intelligence? We capture dolphins to put in marine shows. (Not the U.S. Marines, but water parks. I don’t even know if the U.S. Marines put on shows. Well, there was
Gomer Pyle
, I guess.) It’s kind of like saying, “Boy that Albert Einstein sure is smart. We should have him in a show. I wonder if he would put on a tutu and jump through a ring of fire.”
    Dolphins are also killed by commercial fishermen. They get caught in the nets that are used to catch tuna. I’ll eat tuna, but only if it has that little sticker of the smiling dolphin with a slash through it. This means that the tuna is dolphin free. Actually, I’d like to see that sticker on other things because, frankly, I don’t want dolphin in any of my food. I’d like to see that smiley dolphin sticker on Trix, chocolate cake, toothpaste, everything. They’re looking for any way to sneak dolphin into our food