Tell It Slant, Third Edition, 3rd Edition

3

Jumping the Fence

Marjorie Rose Hakala

Out of the daily feedings and training and classes and animal-visitor encounters of a zoo, there is little that makes it into the news. The stuff that gets the public’s attention and brings out the journalists tends to fall into three categories: 1) An animal was born. 2) An animal died. 3) The barriers broke down. Something got out of the zoo, or someone got in.

Births and deaths are reliable; they happen to every creature in the zoo and every person on the planet. Check the obituaries in the same newspapers, or the ambulance runs, or the society pages. But the escape stories are something else. These were never guaranteed to happen. They are disruptions of a sort found in few other places. To stage ...