Bird is the word

Emus are fucking scary. No, I didn’t mean to write “emos” (although they too make me cringe), I meant emus. Dromaius novaehollandiae. The soft-feathered, brown, flightless and second tallest bird in the world. Which on paper sounds impressive and almost majestic, but in person manifests itself as a strikingly ugly and angry bird. Angry perhaps because it’s from Australia and so, like its human countrymen, it has an over-abundance of aggressive testosterone, or maybe it’s just pissed that it looks like the bastard child of an ostrich that was gang-banged by a homeless dinosaur and one of those bad-guy muppets from The Dark Crystal. Either way, if you’ve never had an emu growl at you, count yourself lucky. It’s a surprisingly low, guttural grunt that seems to emanate from deep within its long, pale blue, scraggly, sparsely feathered asshole of a neck.

Last Friday, when an emu growled at me, it surprised me, not just because I did nothing to provoke it, but also because I never even knew birds could growl, let alone deliver a sound so menacing it made me almost shit my Underoos. The thing about emus is that they also look like they could kick your ass. They have a frazzled Mad Max aura about them, as if they had survived a nuclear apocalypse and were ready to peck the shit out of anyone giving them cut-eye or looking at their unborn as delicious mega-omelettes.

Out of all the animals at the Granby Zoo, the emus were the scariest. We saw lions, tigers and, yes, bears, but the emus were certainly the most menacing. Maybe it’s because lions and tigers are just cats, which means—if they’re anything like my cats—most of the day they’re just sitting around yawning and licking their balls. Bears are also lazy fucks, so they just sleep a lot too. Of course, all the big scary beasties like the rhinos and gorillas were lying bored in these extremely well enclosed habitats that felt depressingly like animal jail. The emus, however had just a small fence separating their deadly beaks from my person. And when we initially called them over to say hello, one looked at me unimpressed, growled and tried to nip my little Filipino face off through the wire grid. It totally sucked. I had never been so scared of a bird since I took acid and had to turn off Sesame Street because I was convinced Big Bird was Satan.

I had visited the Granby Zoo on a whim. It feels as though Montreal has yet to pop off into full summer mode, so last week I was desperate to force some summerish activity. My friend N. took the day off work so we could jaunt off on a mini-road trip to see some beasties. N. was the perfect companion: We shared a love of all things cute and often tried to out-cute each other by Instant Messaging images from Zooborns.com and Cuteoverload.com. Plus, she was one of my only friends who didn’t balk at an hour’s ride on the back of a motorcycle with someone who just got his licence and has a horrible sense of direction.

Let me just say off the bat that I know that zoos are a bit fucked up. If you’ve ever seen the polar bear in the middle of summer at the Central Park Zoo or perused the In Defense of Animals Web site, you know just how fucked up they can be. That said, the ethical debate of conservation versus animal rights is still not cut and dry for me. The standards at Granby seem very high and the caretakers and conservationists seem to be doing their best to make sure the animals are happy. And while it is effed up to see these animals out of their natural habitat, what was more disturbing to me was the people who came to look at them.

It seems there are two types of people that came to the zoo. Those who took the time to learn and listen and read about the animals, and those who came solely to be entertained and would say stupid things like calling chimps “monkeys” (they’re apes, dumbass). Although I had to laugh when a morbidly obese woman was looking at the hippos and laughed, “Look at them! They’re so fat!”

On the whole, even though I learned a lot about the mating habits of alpacas, the feeding habits of camels and the disposition of emus, I left my day at the Granby Zoo with more questions than answers. And while I am still torn over the idea of captive animals as spectacle, one thing about Granby Zoo is certain: If you go, definitely check out the wave pool in the water park. It’s totally sick!

RIFF-RAFF@SYMPATICO.CA