WHERE THE ZOOS BEGIN

Hokitika Guardian, 1 February 1930, Page 8

WHERE THE ZOOS BEGIN

(By Sir Percival Phillips.) SINGAPORE, Dec. 12. Fifteen miles from Singapore, on a lonely patch of treeless swamp hemmed in by jungle and an arm of the sea, is one of the strangest prisoner’s camps in the world—and the most pathetic. It is the place where the zoo begins. Here the wild beasts, birds, and reptiles caught in Malaya and adjacent islands being their life-long captivity. From this primitive clearing house they are consigned to hard labour in a circus or painful inactivity in a private menagerie or a public zoological garden.

It is an ill-assorted community of tho jungle, bound together by ferocity and despair. I have never seen such manifestations of anguish and hate as are witnessed here whenever a human being comes within sight. All the prisoners are newly caught, and they refuse to believe that the rough timber cages are real. Their cries of rage resound hideously in the wilderness, and their desperation is pitiful to see. They sleep but little, and the night is broken by their cries.

On the mudbank above the lagoon J found ten wooden boxes like dogkennels, isolated from tho rest. As I approached I was greeted by a. chorus of lending growls. Six young tigers, all magnificent specimens, literally trembled with fury; one lay on his back in an ecstasy of hate and cursed until he was exhausted. The Tamil attendant walked calmly along the front of their cages, and they gnawed the iron bars in the futile effort to get at him. Alongside were four lesser cats, no less murderous in intent. At the end was a black panther, a beautiful beast; sitting bolt upright on his haunches, staring with malevolent eyes and spitting viciously. He had been only four days in captivity. A night excursion along a high road in Joiiore was his undoing. A planter returning home, on his motor cycle suddenly became aware that the panther was at his side, loping along gracefully, and apparently trying to decide whether to begin on the man or the cycle. The planter put on all speed with such celerity that the surprised panther was left behind. A few hours later native boys went in search of him, and the following night he was neatly trapped.

Under a roof of matting stretched on bamboo poles were boxes and crates of various sizes strewn about indiscriminately. The Tamil rattled the covering of one and instantly a king cobra thrust his hooded head against the wire netting, eager to strike. The lid of another box was cautiously lifted, and a drowsy python, coiled compactly like a length of fire hose, opened his sinister eyes. A scratching noise drew me to another small box marked “sardines.” A weird, half-human face peered wistfully up at me, and a black, hairless hand was thrust through the bars. It was an orang-outang, with a diminutive baby clinging to its breas,t. The baby whimpered, the mother snarled and hid herself under a strip of sacking. Something plucked at my coat, and I turned to find a black, fuzzy monkey, with a mournful face, of the breed known locally as the “Wawa,” trying to leave the perch to which it was chained by the neck alid hide itself in my pocket. Four honey bears saw this manoeuvre from their common prison and,stood upright, beseeching to be noticed. There were birds of all sizies, colours, and designs, some almost too foolish in appearance to be credible, like the one with a bill bigger than its body; others brooding over tlieir plight, like the defiant eagle, whose breast was tom and bleeding. It kept dashing itself with outstretched wings against the wire netting that separated it from a falcon, in a vain effort to give battle.

Tlere were llamas from South America, awaiting the fancy of some Eastern collector, a half-grown crocodile that responded angrily to the prodding of a hooked stick; a leopard lashing itself into hysteria; halt a dozen tawny wildcats with enormous yellow eyes, eager to fight anything and anybody; a pen inhabited by young •wallabies; peacocks disdaining a friendly greeting; and other birds with grey plumage three feet long, crowded miserably into cubicles and unable to move.

Here, in the vast silence of the jungle, the strangely assorted captives are allowed to exhaust their fury and gradually to accept their fate. Buyers come to look them over and haggle with the Indian proprietor of the camp. AH are for sale. T could have bought the crocodile or the black panther at a fair price, or taken away a cobra in exchange fo Straits dollars. Consignments leave every little while for Europe or the Americas. A few days previous to m> visit four tiges, a panther, and ai elephant had been shipped to a public park in the United States. .. * * * * Oddly enough, this strange zoo o' hardly known in Singapore. Severe’ old residents, to whom I described my visit, were almost inclined t doubt its existence. Y'et 'the proprietor, who charged me Is to see his

“guests,” regards himself as a kind of local institution, and he has put I up a wooden sign at the corner of the ' Pongol road with the inscription: “To j the Singapore Zoo.” | • I am inclined to believe that if the , patrons of Regent’s Park could see tlie anguish ap'd despair of these new- I ly caught animals, tlio London Zoo would be a less attractive place.