A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
I wandered over the the Botanical Gardens/Zoo/History of Vietnam Museum complex yesterday, and was scarred by the experience. The botanical gardens were nice, if a bit seedy, and the History of Vietnam Museum was pretty good, mercifully ending its march through history with the defeat of the French and the rise of the Indochine Communist Party, who "proposed the correct revolution platform in 1930", according to the museum displays. I've had about enough anti-US propaganda -- it was good to see some official vitriol directed at the Chinese and the French.

No, the problem with this outing was the zoo. The less said the better, really, but since I'm here anyway, I'll tell you all about it in painful detail. The HCM City Zoo was depressing in a way that only 3rd world zoos can be. I see extreme poverty every day and, though it doesn't really reflect well on me, it doesn't bother me as much as seeing these pitifully caged animals.

The birds were first. The pelicans had a fairly nice enclosure -- largish with greenery and a pond -- but they all spent 95% of their time chewing at their feathers like they had fleas or some persistently annoying tropical parasite. However, these guys were living in the lap of luxury compared to their avian brothers, who were mostly in 10' x 15' concrete floored cages with one failing rtree and a large bucket of water. I don't even like birds and it made me kind of ill.

And things just got worse. The two tigers, in separate cages, just paced back and forth along parellel 15 foot stretches of fence with their eyes glazed over. The emus were losing their feathers in a big way -- bald spots, if you can believe it. The smaller cats each got their own cage with concrete floor, dirty water, and a live bunny hopping around. There were no dead bunnies in sight -- I can only assume they were waiting for darkness for the big hunt. Either that or they were all drugged, not an entirely unlikely theory.

I truly believe that one of the alligators was dead. I watched for several minutes and he never moved a muscle. The hippos were each allotted a space about 10 times their body size, with a V-shaped concrete pool less than 20 feet wide and 3 feet deep. One of them was actually standing up with his front legs on the wall trying to look at his pitiful compatriot in the next enclosure.

Every single animal in that zoo appeared to have a skin condition, some unknown disease, or severe depression. The elephants looked like their ears had been half chewed off, and the many deer (God only knows why they had such a huge deer section, most of which looked pretty much like the ones that Dad hits with his car every couple of months) were all losing patches of hair in various places.

All in all, the visit convinced me to never again go to a developing country's animal exhibit. It's the first time I've been to a zoo in which I walked around hoping the next cage would be completely empty, a sign that at least one animal had escaped the misery. I hear that in Cambodia they closed all the zoos and ate all the animals. It sounds callous, but I can't help but think that would be a decent solution for the Ho Chi Minh City Zoo.

© 2002 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 7:43 PM