This Polar Bear wants to eat that child...Pic. Gary McGuffin, Canada.com
I don’t have a problem with people who want to do stupid things – jump out of perfectly good planes with a bit of silk on their back, off a bridge with a bit of rope around your ankles, play cricket…hey, as long it doesn’t bother me or involve cruelty to animals or small things…
But I don’t like seeing animals in cages…I just can’t see the point and my goat really gets got when I see people doing stupid things in animals in cages.
Like the poor Polar Bear sucking up to the glass that separates him from the juicy morsel that is the child in the water and this huuuge Crocodile that wants to get to the poor fools in the perspex cage.
And that Crocodile wants to eat those mugs in the cage...
In the small tropical city of Darwin, in Australia’s Northern Territory you can swim with crocodiles.
In the similarly small town of Cochrane, in Canada’s northern Ontario, you can swim with polar bears.
Darwin is hot and (very) sweaty and in the tropics. Cochrane is is Canada’s frigid north. What is it about these two climatically opposites that leads them to develop tourist attractions with big things that can eat people?
I was in Cape Town in South Africa a few months back and squeezed in two trips on small boats about 50 miles offshore to chase fishing trawlers and their attendant massive flocks of seabirds around. The boat we went out on usually takes real thrill seekers to sit in a cage and be lowered into the sea off a small rocky island in Cape Town harbour called Seal Island.
At the right time of year a herd of Great White Sharks (known in Australia as White Pointers) come back to hunt the thousands of seal that live and breed on the island…and all that sits between you and several hundred kilos of toothy killer is a few millimetres of aluminium cage…
I didn’t manage to get onto the shark cage trip this time but it is top of my list for my next trip to South Africa…and no, I won;t be going in the cage with the poor crocodile next time I’m in Darwin.
Got a view about this posting?
Been in the cage at Darwin, in the pool at Cochrane or in the sea with the Great Whites in Cape Town?.
Drop me a line and let us all know what you think!
