The story was only about cicadas, but but still it made me wince. It is the time of year when the 17-year cicadas emerge from their Rip Van Winkle slumber. The story in today's paper reported on the budding appetites at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo -- how the little creatures are "more than just really noisy insects: they're delicious treats." The good news for zoo nutritionists is that cicadas "may seem like candy to the animals -- crunchy on the outside and soft in the center -- they're actually health food."
But that's not the part of the story that caused my discomfort. Maybe I should, but I'm not really losing sleep over the animals' culinary free-for-all. I don't want to join them in the snack line, but I'm happy for their treat. The pain was in the article's closing quote, offered by the zoo's behavioral husbandry manager: "Getting eaten by exotic animals is a better way to go than being eaten by a squirrel or a crow."
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure he was trying to be cute, or give voice to some parental pride in the breeds under his care, but his comment caught me as one more expression of the kind of cultural bigotry that picks the scabs of our social wounds and keeps them from healing. Must we continue to divide the world into "exotic" and "ordinary" -- "special" and virtually "disposable"? How long will we continue to shove certain segments of creation over the cliff of desirability just to sweeten the neighborhood of those who remain?
And does the cicada really get some larger satisfaction from being masticated by a bearded dragon lizard than by the nibbling of a squirrel?
Please.
But that's not the part of the story that caused my discomfort. Maybe I should, but I'm not really losing sleep over the animals' culinary free-for-all. I don't want to join them in the snack line, but I'm happy for their treat. The pain was in the article's closing quote, offered by the zoo's behavioral husbandry manager: "Getting eaten by exotic animals is a better way to go than being eaten by a squirrel or a crow."
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure he was trying to be cute, or give voice to some parental pride in the breeds under his care, but his comment caught me as one more expression of the kind of cultural bigotry that picks the scabs of our social wounds and keeps them from healing. Must we continue to divide the world into "exotic" and "ordinary" -- "special" and virtually "disposable"? How long will we continue to shove certain segments of creation over the cliff of desirability just to sweeten the neighborhood of those who remain?
And does the cicada really get some larger satisfaction from being masticated by a bearded dragon lizard than by the nibbling of a squirrel?
Please.
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