7. Bottled Lion

In the pleasant Chinese summer evenings, many people come out for a walk once the sun goes down, so the main street of Wudaokou naturally becomes a market. People sell vegetables and fruit, sweets, fried foods, and pets such as puppies, kittens, and raccoons. The baby animals are kept in small cages with so many in a cage there’s no spare room.

When I was staying with Five-foot I would walk past the same animals in the same cage being sold by the same vendor at the same street corner all week, and it was difficult to stay unattached to plight of the things. I watched one particular kitten, noting its progress every night one week as it lost more and more cage-mates by the day and got thinner and thinner as the week went on. I wanted to liberate it but what would happen to it when I left town? It would just be forgotten, as many were, left to fend for itself.

Animals aren’t regarded with much dignity in China, as I found out when I visited the zoo.

I can think of at least three reasons why people would like going to Beijing Zoo. Firstly, if you want to see Giant Pandas then it’s the place to go. The Pandas are cute, munching away on their leaves, but they didn’t really do anything but sit there. They didn’t seem to enjoy people’s company, not that I blame them. They all looked quite dejected and bored.

The second reason to go to the zoo is if you love animals and want to set them free. That’s not a bad reason either because, as you would soon find out, the animals there could definitely do with the liberation. With battle scars and serious malnourishment evident everywhere, the animals looked more like tortured slaves than the cared-for refugees that many zoos purport. But if you did try to help any animals out the gate, be prepared to be shot or imprisoned as Beijing officials consider the zoos important tourist attractions and academic research fraternities. Indeed, the front gate listed all the awards the zoo had received from the Chinese science, tourism and welfare institutes that seem to matter.

And the third reason I could think of to go to the zoo was if you hate animals and enjoy tormenting and torturing them. If you fit into this category, well, that’s a fantastic reason, because you’ll fit in with a heck of a lot of other people. As I was looking around, watching these animals in ‘natural habitat’, which includes concrete walls and iron fences, people walked past whistling, growling and hissing at the lions, tigers, bears, with the animals seemingly ignoring it all. There were plastic bottles and other rubbish thrown into the enclosures, some of it obviously aimed at the beasts, probably in the hope of provoking some sort of ferocious reaction to entertain the zoo goer. But the animals just look depressed as hell.

The signs telling people to not feed the animals were all duly ignored with soft drink being poured into the mouths of waiting animals, and bags of chips and biscuits being emptied. Zoo staff walked by not bothered by the feeding frenzies going on in plain view. The nearby rubbish bins were shunned for the more open expanse of the concrete enclosures where empty bottles and food packages were either dropped in for the animals to play with or choke on, or surrounded the beasts as though they were a target.

I went looking for the “Tamed animal performance area” expecting to be horrified even further by whatever was on display. After doing several circuits around the park, I came to the conclusion that the performing tamed animals area had been replaced with an “Untamed children’s performance area” in the guise of a video games hall.

After a visit with some dolphins in the aquarium, I decided to leave. I found the zoo a more interesting as a place to observe Chinese people’s interactions with animals than the animals themselves.