Animals | Character | Cruelty | Death | Evil | Kindness | Lost | Sensitivity | Sin | Violence | Weakness

PEOPLE ARE SUCH ANIMALS
Recently Detroit’s zoo added four new employees — security guards, not to contain the animals, but to protect them from people. In the past two years they have had a baby Australian wallaby stoned to death, a duck killed by a steel-tipped hunting arrow, a pregnant reindeer who miscarried after firecracker-throwing teenagers sent her into a panic. Visitors have dropped lighted cigar butts on the backs of alligators, laughing at the reptiles’ reactions as the ashes burn through their skins. Finally, the zoo’s hippopotamus choked to death when someone responded to his open-mouthed begging for peanuts by rolling a tennis ball down his throat. In the Time magazine report of these incidents the writer comments, “The zookeepers wonder: Who should be in cages?”