Cooped Up

Today

At last, after many months of anxiety, I can enjoy my beautiful pond and stream. All kinds of life leap and lurk within it: toads, frogs, newts, caddis flies, dragonflies, water beetles and heaps more.

We've added to the variety with about fifty fish - grass carp, shubunkin, rudd, orfe and golden tench. The tench stay firmly on the bottom, but the others swim around in various groupings, clearly loving the sun-warmed water. Some people ask me if I feed the fish to make them tame, but I say "no", because there's plenty of food and I like them to be shy so that they dash for cover at the smallest noise or sign of a bird overhead. That way they have a better chance of avoiding any herons that pass by.

When we were in Kilcrohane last week we visited a local shop which had a large goldfish bowl in which were a goldfish and a very large shubunkin which swam in a perpetual circular motion, practically meeting its own tail, having no choice. Not a patch on my lovely "posse" of darting and diving free fish.

In My Day

It took a single visit to the circus when I was about eight to convince me that to coerce, restrain and encage animals purely for our enjoyment is wrong. At the circus, I didn't mind the clowns and was suitably impressed by the high-wire artistes. But to make horses gallop around on their hind legs (sometimes ridden by dogs also on their hind legs), beat and terrify lions and tigers into submission and persuade that most noble of creatures, the elephant, to stand on its back legs and catch balls, was ridiculous and humiliating to all concerned. 

Add the fact that they spent the rest of their time in cramped cages that were driven all over the country and I lost all interest in circuses that use animals.

My favourite zoo as a child was Whipsnade in which at least some of animals roamed freely. It was a precursor of safari parks, which I very much enjoy visiting. London Zoo with its smelly, endlessly pacing big cats in tiny cages and other locked-up animals I always visited with mixed feelings. Only the penguins on their outdoor Mappin Terraces seemed have any sort of space in which to be comfortable.

I don't think its wrong to own animals and to have the pleasure of watching their antics, but this should be on their terms, not purely ours.