Pictures at the Zoo

Tell us about a time you went to a zoo, aquarium, pet store, or animal shelter. What did you notice about the animals who were inside the cages? How do you think they felt about being there?

"I have two nieces and a nephew. They’re all like, four six and eight, or something like that. And, they’d all been to the zoo many, many times before; it was not a new thing for them to go to the zoo. It was three minutes from their house.

But, Claire is four and they can’t have animals at home cause their all allergic to everything. And so the zoo was the closest that they’d ever get too animals, its the closest that they will ever get to having an animal around. And, so, she loves the zoo because she really loves animals.

And, so they were ADHD all day long. You know, one of them is looking at the giraffes, and one of them is running over here to look at the elephants, and one of them was runnin’ over there because she wants to see the polar bear, which is on the other side of the zoo. And its just me I’ll have to run around after all of them.

But Claire the littlest one wasn’t content to just look at the animals. She didn’t want to go to the petting zoo either because the goats at this petting zoo were like horses. They were the biggest goats I have ever seen. So, she didn’t want to go to to touch them because they would eat her.

So instead she decided she wanted to take pictures of every single animal she saw. So, not only did I have to go with her to the animals, because she’s the smallest one she needed the chaperone. But then we had to use the camera, line up the shot, make sure it was perfect. We took four or five of every animal, make sure we had a good shot of every one.

And then she always would say, “Will mommy like this picture,” and “I don’t know if mommy is gonna like this picture? So, we're gonna have to take another one cause mommy’s  not gonna like that one." And so, she went home, with a collection, with a zoo all of her own on the camera. Which is really cute, but also kind of sad because she will never actually have an animal in her house, and the best she could get was this series of pictures.

So, it was kind of a this bittersweet thing to watch her go through."