The other night as I was putting off bedtime because that means it is soon going to be morning, and in the morning I have to struggle to get the #1 son out of bed and get to work on time, where the students will torment me by playing the Catch Me With My Cell Phone, I Dare You game, I was flipping through America's Top 150 and Showtime, and stopped at a little comedy show called Big Les: Problem Child. It was stand-up from comedian Leslie Jones.
This show has been on my mind lately, because it makes me laugh out loud. Ms. Jones ponders why white folks can't leave the wild animals alone. They hike into the mountains and get eaten by a mountain lion, and as they're dying, they are thinking, "Where'd that come from?" HELLO! It's a MOUNTAIN lion. It ain't no kitchen lion. It ain't no bathroom lion. And all that mountain lion can think about is why his lunch was wearing a backpack. Then there's the lady who was eaten by a snake she raised from a baby. And every time she went to feed that snake, and baby-talk to it about how cute it was, that snake was thinking, "Ssssssssoon. Ssssssssoon. Ssssssssoon, b^tch!" She raised her own killer. And we won't even talk about their fascination with monkeys. Monkey's who can't wait to throw sh*t at them. It's freakin' hilarious. But if you don't like profanity, don't listen to Leslie Jones.
So while I was reminiscing on this show, that darn Tilikum had to go and murder his trainer. Which makes it not so much unfunny as politically incorrect to laugh about such a matter. That darn Tilikum is such a fun-sucker, sucking the fun out of my memories of Big Les. But really. Even a comedian knows that you shouldn't take a wild animal and think you can train the wildness out of it. Tilikum wasn't thinking about how nice the trainer treated him, and how people gave him food and shelter in exchange for a few performances a day. Tilikum, now the killer of not one, not two, but THREE people, was not even thinking, "I hate you, b*tch, for making me perform like a trained seal when I am a majestic killer whale." Nope. Tilikum was thinking only one thing: PREY!
Because, you see, in the words of comedian Leslie Jones, Tilikum is not a man's best friend whale, or a petting zoo whale, or a special therapy whale. Tilikum is a freakin' KILLER whale!!! A freakin' KILLER whale who had already killed TWO other people.
It's not like he snuck out at night to cruise around and kill people. Stay away from the tank, people. Stay away from the tank.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I hear that. I'm all for propagating wild animals in captivity to save them from extinction (and buying them time while fixing what we f*cked up messing with their habitats) but to raise them and keep them for entertainment value is just wrong. They are wild animals. You can't expect them to be tame because you think you have them "trained".
To really appreciate a wild animal, you just need to leave it alone...in the wild, where it belongs. Photographs and knowledge last longer than the memory of some lame Sea World show. It's also safer.
I try to think about from the animal's perspective. Would *I* like it if someone threw me into an enclosure and expected me to do tricks for entertainment? Would I be happy, being taken away from my home and the things that I loved? Hell no.
Why should we expect a wild animal to behave in what we define as "normal" behavior when there's nothing normal about being stuffed in a small enclosure doing things that are not in its normal behavior??
Chick,
Those wacky wild animals, never appreciating all we do for them!!!
Post a Comment