The Dusit Zoo

I’ve always found zoos to be depressing places but I can’t resist going to them to see animals I wouldn’t otherwise be able to. I say depressing because the animals are always depressed by their tiny cages and end up pacing back and forth wearing a rut into a patch of grass. At the Dusit Zoo it was sad to see the tiny enclosures for the animals but perhaps even worse to see the visitors’ interaction with them.
Near the entrance I watched a dad pick leaves off a tree so his daughter could feed them through a fence to emus. The scraggly emus, though finding the leaves unappetizing, kept coming back to fence to take more just in case the family had given found something different to feed them. It wasn’t harmful to the emus but I was just wondering, what the hell are they doing?

A large Sun bear stood on a rock and swayed back and forth in an unhealthy way, sometimes reaching his claws to paw into the air at nothing. Only a small moat separated the visitors from the bear and the people took this opportunity to throw french fries at the crazy old thing. The bear didn’t even eat any of them, the fries just bounced off of him and fell into the water where they were eaten by the huge orange and white goldfish in the moat.


The Dusit Zoo had oddly enormous collection of plain, uninteresting turtles. There were more than a handful of non-descript concrete pools in which the turtles laid in the water or swam in small circles. For what I assume to be for good luck, all the Thais flipped coins into the pens aiming for the turtles’ backs. One Baht coins shined at the bottom of the pools and all of the turtles who chose to relax near the edge of the visitors’ side had coins resting on their backs.

I think perhaps the tigers were the most content of the animals because they were allowed to lounge around all day since they didn’t have to worry about hunting. Or maybe I just caught them all during their mid-day nap, just before they too started to walk around in monotonous circles.


In of all places, Thailand seems like it would take care of its elephants. The elephants here had little-to-no room to roam and all four of them appeared to have long gone crazy. The one here was swaying, taking one step forward, one step back, staring at the wall. All I could think, about the rest of the animals as well as the elephants, was: they don’t belong here.