I am going to share with you one of the chapters from the newest installment of my action/adventure/comedy science fiction series: The Otherwhere Chronicles, which is going to be available very soon. The second book is called: Down To Earth. That is because our hero goes back to Earth and visits the San Francisco Bay Area to visit his mother… before a bunch of really weird stuff happens. I am not even going to explain how this chapter makes any sense or what led up to it. I am going to let the humor speak for itself… in a funny cartoon voice.

All you need to know is that the narrator is an alien.

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Chapter Sixteen

Please allow me a brief moment to tell you some things about zoos that you already know on some deep, instinctual level, but have most likely not ever bothered to put into words as I am trying to do. People, and by people I do not necessarily mean human people only, tend to think of zoos when they bother to think of them at all, as a fun place to take their kids so that they can see cute and funny and sometimes scary animals as they walk around, or eat, or sleep or play. And on the face of it, that is true enough. But there is much more going on with zoos than just that.

I was once at the San Diego zoo, a rather famous one on Earth, and I came face to face with a tiger. Fortunately for me we were separated by thick tiger-proof glass, but I was close enough to see the hairs on its tongue. Our eyes met, and a deep, primitive part of my brain that did not know about tiger-proof glass said quite clearly, ‘do not even bother to run, it will just make the pain of your death more drawn out’. It is indeed enjoyable to watch a tiger walking around being a tiger, but this tends to apply more to tigers who are safely locked up and unable to show us directly how much more tigerish they could be if they could only get their claws into us. Your odds of seeing a tiger when walking down the average city street are rather slim, and this is no accident. If you do see one, it probably escaped from a zoo.

Back when humans wore animal skins and carried only pointed sticks for protection I can assure you that the thrill of seeing a tiger being all tigery was not one that the average person was looking for to add a little excitement to their day. As humans advanced and began to conquer their environment, large predators were a threat and competition for food resources. Humans were fighting lions and tigers and bears, oh my, for ages, far longer than their modern society has lasted. And you know what? In India, tigers still kill people fairly regularly, and there aren’t even that many wild tigers left.

The natural urge to dominate nature, even though nature is where we all came from, is in no way a human monopoly. No species can become the dominant species of a planet without first, well, dominating the other species, obviously. This primitive drive to become masters over nature is what leads to societies and civilizations. All over the universe this has led to strange paths of behavior, but somehow the paths seem to converge eventually into wild animals being placed in enclosures for public viewing, hence; the zoo. Zoos are an almost universal invention, where the mastery over primitive nature can be shown to our progeny as if to say, ‘look, it is safe to walk around now, because we kicked nature’s ass.’ But the paths that lead to zoos have many strange twists and turns, so let me take your human zoos and your history of trying to gain control over the creatures you live with as an example.

Before you invented zoos, here are a few other methods you used to put the animals in their places. Obviously it always begins with domestication and farming, two traits that go with early cultural development. Domesticating wild animals, along with farming, is needed to ensure a stable food supply for a growing culture. But it rarely stops there. Have you ever wondered how you got from putting sheep in a pen so that you could eat one whenever you felt like it, to trying to teach your dog how to speak? Or sending a chimp into space? It may even surprise you to learn that wild dogs do not need to be trained in order to learn to sit or lie down. They figure it out for themselves, but they do it when they feel like it, believe it or not.

Domestication leads to training, and training leads to some farfetched ways of showing nature just who is the boss. Let’s look at some examples; Riding around on horses, great idea! Riding around on an angry bull that is made angrier by a rope tied around his genitals, while impressive, does strike the outsider as a little odd. Teaching dolphins to jump through flaming hoops, or circus bears to ride tiny tricycles, well, before you defend these ideas just let me say, ‘hey, I am not judging you, I am only pointing out the facts.’

What about the human penchant for talking cartoon animals? Disney created an empire based on them, but why? And how, for that matter? You even draw little cartoon clothes on the little cartoon animals, not from modesty I assume, since some of Disney’s famous characters have no pants. It is as if humans are only comfortable with animals if the animals are in some way made more human. And all this silliness derives from the need to be masters of our environment.

Now think about what domestication implies, if you would be so kind. It is the most horrid of predator-prey relationships. If you go out and hunt a chicken, well, the chicken you kill is unlucky to be sure, but it is a one-on-one, personal confrontation. Sort of like mugging a very small victim and killing him to steal his caloric intake. It is bad for the victim, but prey animals expect to lose a few of their number and breed accordingly. These things happen in nature. Arthur’s mother, an avid birdwatcher, was fond of saying ‘Nature in the wild is seldom mild’, which about sums it up.

But pause to consider the fate of the chicken that is caught and held perpetual hostage, which is basically what domestication means for food animals. You are telling that poor chicken that you are going to eat it, but only after it produces more chickens for a few years, and then you are going to eat its children and their children down through the ages. ‘Oh, and by the way, we are going to eat many of your descendants while still in the embryonic stage,’ which is particularly harsh if you think about it. So in a strange way, you are still eating that same damn chicken over and over. I seem to have drifted off topic, which by now I am sure you have noticed I have a tendency to do, but if you have survived my semi philosophical ramblings here is the point I am trying to make;

Somewhere in the dawn of human history, a primitive man watched as a tiger ate one of his friends or relatives, and thought to himself, ‘self, we cannot just have tigers walking around all over the place. It makes it difficult to get things done, like raising living children and so on. We should do something about all those tigers.’ So for millennium, having no other alternative, humans killed tigers every chance they got.

Now don’t get me wrong, there is a great measure of respect for these creatures along with obvious fear. Virtually every early culture that lived alongside tigers considered them near deities, and the tiger totem was strong magic. But this just led to a situation where hunters sought the glory and status of hunting the most dangerous beast. What could impress those early females like a tiger skin rug and some really big fangs hung around your neck? ‘Look,’ your fashionable trophies and accessories proclaimed, ‘I am really dominating my natural environment, baby.’

Eventually, some brave hunter who couldn’t get a date thought, ‘if killing a tiger is impressive, what about a pet tiger? Hey, it worked with wolves, and now we have dogs.’ This experiment does not seem to have panned out, or your housecats would presumably be much larger. But through experimentations such as this, the long, tangled trail of mankind’s relationship with the tiger has led us back to zoos. Sooner or later, if you hunt tigers effectively, they will become rare and endangered. Then people, some of them the hunters themselves, become very nostalgic about the good old days when you couldn’t swing a pointed stick without whacking some bemused tiger in the snout. And suddenly zoos are the last hope of keeping these rare and marvelous creatures alive.

Of course in your planet’s case, the strange path to zoos has also led to circus acts such as one which I saw personally where a man went into a cage with five full-grown tigers carrying only a whip. And you know what? It is not a job I would want to have, but I bet he gets a lot of dates. It is just that one must always remember that achieving dominance over a tiger is still a matter of perception, not only to the human, but to the tiger as well. Just ask Siegfried and Roy.

So I have taken the long way round just to tell you what Arthur learned about Tooom and his planet, but you will hopefully see why I felt this digression was needed. Once again Arthur’s fingers worked their magic on the memory stone, and once again the stone eagerly responded by giving him a mental massage with full release, if you’ll pardon me for saying so. Arthur turned back to the alien visitor again, full of understanding, yet completely lacking in sympathy. And still at a complete loss as to how to proceed.

To human eyes, the Zitarans looked like burnt tree stumps, with a bark-like black and dark-brown skin and a wide base that spread like tree roots. Even their tops appeared jagged like a broken off and singed tree. They had small branch-like arms ending in branch-like, three-fingered hands. They moved about on their root-like feet-tentacles a little like the Xxo moved on their lower tentacles.

Tooom’s people had grown up on a world full of terrifying predators, and they were on the menu with frightening regularity. They called their world Zitar, and the Zitarans were at first ill-equipped to deal with their large, fast and fierce tormentors. The Zitarans were small and slow and evidently very tasty.

The only advantage the Zitarans had was their rapidly evolving brains. They built more sophisticated defensive structures and weapons for protection, which of course helped jumpstart their development, because as we all know, trying not to be eaten all the time can really get those creative brain juices flowing. It tends to focus the mind as well. Slowly the Zitarans gained mastery over the other unruly species, but along the way they developed an almost pathological need to dominate every life form they came across. Zitarans never feel comfortable with any other creatures just walking around doing whatever they wish.

The Zitarans have carried the idea of the zoo to its farthest levels of applicability. Every individual Zitaran has his own private zoo, a collection of unique specimens kept humanely, or Zitaranely alive, and if possible, reproductively active. Zitarans have developed a sociopathic feeling that they alone are the divine beings in all the universe, and every other species is just another competitor for space and food, even though rationally they realize they don’t really need all that much space or food. So they symbolically attempt to show their domination not by war, but by taming and domesticating the opposition. Not the entire species mind you, but at least a symbolic representative or two. Or more.

Arthur had just learned that this has been going on for millennium. The Zatarans, when they learned of a new race, would be psychologically driven to have at least a few ‘specimens’ in captivity for semiprivate viewing and a possible breeding program. And humans were definitely a new race. Collectors of rare breeds would pay a high price for live humans. Arthur was now aware that there were literally millions of beings of thousands of intelligent species being kept secretly and against their will as living exhibits on the planet of Zitara.

“Well that ain’t gonna fly,” Arthur mumbled to himself as he cast a dark glance at Tooom.