Rays of Imagination

The Zoo

Personal Narrative Essay

Written on October 9, 2016

A/N: I wrote this for an English class and the teacher really liked it, like a lot, lol, so I decided to add it here, in this collection. :)

P.S: If you are wondering, I don't know when this collection will end. It might be going on forever or it might stop somewhere sooner or later. I dunno. :P

Anywayyy...

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The evening started out horrible. It was just another day, when my mother woke me up from my peaceful slumber to go to some stupid zoo, as I'd thought at the time. Now, I think of it as much worse. I was very grumpy as my family and I piled into our car. My sour mood slowly turned even more dreadful. And that was all because of the nasty place they called "a zoo".

When we entered the fair, my line of sight landed on the amusement rides. I felt slightly giddy, though not so much. My bad mood hadn't left completely. But as it turned out, we didn't get a chance to have the fun. It took about five minutes of walking for us to reach our destination. Hidden speakers were blaring out realistic animal sounds. Lions, birds... it was all in that speaker. A man handed us our tickets, which now that I think about it, were way too expensive for what was behind that door. The door which we entered and were struck with a horrid smell of goats and such.

I scrunched my nose and covered it, gagging. We quickly stepped away from the entrance, fanning away the smell with our hands. What I saw in that circular area was beyond bad. It was devious. Tiny metal cages with all kinds of animals sat in a circle around the room, while a cage that contained four screeching monkeys sat in the middle. I hated this already. I looked around the place and my eye caught on a hyena that looked delirious and was pacing back and forth in its cage. My eyebrows furrowed and my hands clenched. My family and I walked around the outdoor room, stopping at each of the animals. The state of most of them irked me. Toward the end, we came across a man who held a long stick in his hands. I didn't know what it was for, until I found out.

A lioness sat in her cage, resting and watching the passersby. The man with the metal rod saw us viewing the lioness and came up to the cage. What he did next made me so angry I felt my face burning. The guy poked the rod inside the cage and into the poor lioness's side. She cried out and lashed at him. My father explained that he was trying to make the animals 'active' and make the viewers happy. That was no excuse to abuse an animal, in my opinion. The man did the same with the other animals, not letting them sleep or even lie down, which would've have been so uncomfortable on the hot metal their cages were made of.

That was probably one of the worst experiences in my life. It made me realize something about this world. People don't seem to understand that animals can feel, too. They have a heart. They are living creatures and they feel pain just as we do. We as humans need to respect them. People don't seem to get that. They don't want to get that. That shows the cruelty of us, and I wish that would change.