Animal Non-sense

Yesterday we went with daughter-Jo and grandchildren to our local ‘Africa Alive’. It used to be a ‘wildlife park’; now it’s a ‘zoological reserve.’ We saw lions, giraffes, zebras, rhinoceroses…

I felt obliged, duty-bound, to tell grandad animal jokes… ‘How can you tell a weasel from a stoat? …A weasel’s weasily distinguishable… a stoat’s stotally different.’

Animal non-sense.

We saw the aardvarks, lemurs, mongooses, (mongeese?)… There were signs: ‘Porcupines talk at 11.00’, ‘Meercats talk at 12.00’.

We discussed the signs… Would humans talk about said animals at the advertised time? Perhaps they meant that that at 11.00 the porcupines talk… Could understand them? If the meercats talk at 12.00, do they take a vow of silence for the rest of the day? If we talked only at 12.00…?

Animal non-sense.

We looked at the flamingos… remembering Alice in Wonderland’s croquet game… the mallets were flamingos and the balls were hedgehogs…

‘The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face with such a puzzled expression that she could not help burst out laughing…’

Animal non-sense.

Musing…

…Animal non-sense… animals facing extinction, necessary conservation plans, the effects of climate change, pollution, deforestation on wild life…

…’God made all sorts of wild animals, livestock, and small animals, each able to produce offspring of the same kind . And God saw that it was good.’ (Genesis 1:24)

…Noah and his zoological reserve… Noah’s God’s 4 times repeated promise: ‘When I see the rainbow in the clouds, I will remember the eternal covenant between God and every living creature on earth.’ (Genesis 9:12-17)

…The encouragement that Noah’s God, my God’s, in control… somehow making sense out of my non-sense…