so yesterday i got to go to Six Flags, which is a rollercoaster [and animal it turns out] park in California and had the raddest rollercoastering day!

and i also got to ‘meet’ Odin the Bengal tiger who was a most beautiful and majestic animal [sorry lion!]:

odin

That picture doesn’t really do him justice – Odin was a beast! Beautiful, sleek, with big flabby paws that thumped around on the ground as he majestically wandered around…

…his tiny little tiger space.

SNAKES ON A PANE

it actually started with the snakes. there were these six tiny compartments and four of them had snakes in them behind the glass and the spaces were really small.

then i saw the tiger and was bummed by how much [little] space he had – he would basically walk up to the glass [where all us tourists could gawk at him, great word ‘gawk’] and turn around and walk maybe five or six steps away and then have to turn around and come back and continue doing these little laps.

this has never really bothered me before, but for some reason it did yesterday and i told Aaron who was with me that if there wasn’t the danger of the tiger eating me and everyone else – and quite possibly the legal ramifications of freeing a wild animal at Six Flags – i would have loved to have freed Odin. that dude needs space.

for the first time ever, animals in captivity really bugged me. 

and i thought of the beginning of the world and God creating all these beautiful animals and inviting mankind to manage and be lord of the earth and all of the creatures and i can’t help thinking this is not what He meant.

let us take these wild beasts of nature and let us stick them in cages and make them perform shows for our pleasure. with not much thought of them at all and what they might need to be who they really are.

let’s do this thing that works really well for us even though it doesn’t work so well for someone else – that kind of selfishness feels like the root of all kinds of evil…

odincage

so i’m sorry Mr Odin, i wish there was something i could do for you, because you do not belong in that tiny space and you really deserve more than to have tourists come close to your window and take photos of you [and not even take a moment to just appreciate you as you are – like i literally saw people come and take pictures and that was their experience of you – so they will go home and have in their possession pictures they could have downloaded off the internet which would have given them the exact same experience because they were so busy recording their experience they forgot to actually have it] and not even fully appreciate you. you should be out in the wild somewhere being a bengal tiger.

and you should be in a space that allows you to stretch out and be at your full length without hitting a glass pane mister snake.

sad face.