by Gwynn White
In the past, arguments of zoo opponents were based on human insensitivity towards animals—but this has changed with modern zoos.
Captive-breeding and advanced conservation programs at many modern zoos have literally rescued hundreds of animals from the brink of extinction. Alas, mainly because of habitat destruction, many of these species cannot be re-introduced back into the wild, and so the zoo becomes the only place that the animal can survive.
My time working in wildlife preserves and with people who run zoos has also shown me that many take great pains and spend considerable resources to recreate natural habitats.
In addition, people now understand that a significant majority of those who manage these wildlife preserves do care deeply for the animals. This is especially true for a handful of wildlife preserves whose owners don’t operate them as profit centers.
The Glen Eden Zoo and Wildlife Preserve was one such non-profit institution. Endowed with an annual infusion of funds from the Weston Foundation, it embodied its founders’ belief that zoos and wildlife preserves increased our appreciation and empathy for the natural world around us, making the global natural world more vital, real and accessible to more people than ever before.
Consequently, these institutions believed, more people would undertake to value and preserve not just human life, but all life.
Personally, I felt that this was one of the few ways humanity could make amends for the wrongs that it continued to inflict on this world.
I’d been to the Toronto Zoo before, and to African Lion Safari near St. Jacob’s, Ontario, but never to Glen Eden Zoo. When Dad and I brought the zebra there to stay, it was my first time to visit.
Glen Eden Zoo was set in over forty acres of natural conservation area just outside Milton, Ontario, less than an hour’s drive from where we lived. Later on, when I worked there, I and the other staff got used to just calling it Glen Eden, and sometimes simply the Zoo.
Dad and I arrived at the Zoo just before opening time. The main road into Glen Eden was already lined with ground spinners, and other vehicles, lined up for the visitors’ entrance. We bypassed that entrance, took a side road further down, and then turned into a service road, as we’d been directed to over the phone.
A woman was standing at the back gate, about the same age as my folks, dressed in khakis, boots, and beaming.
“Hello, I’m Judith Weston,” she said, offering her hand when we got down. “I’m the director here at Glen Eden.”
“John Harbridge. This is my daughter Zara. She’s the one who found the zebra,” my dad said, motioning toward me.
“And that’s Leia,” I said, nodding toward the zebra.
“Leia she is, then,” said Judith, peering in the back of the truck. “So, Leia, what fast legs you have. We’ve been looking high and low for you. And good on you, Zara, to have found her,” she added. “It’s getting cold, and zebras don’t really take to the winters here in Canada very well.”
“Me, neither,” I said. Leia stared at us from the back of the truck, her tail flicking.
Judith jumped in the back, making soothing noises, and started feeling Leia’s muscles. “What’s she been feeding on?”
“We’ve been giving her spinach and lettuce,” Dad said. “But before that, grass and leaves?”
“You did great. We’ll get her back up and running before you can say ‘member of the horse family’,” said Judith, jumping off the truck bed.
“Equine,” I said.
“Whoa, you should come and work with us,” Judith grinned. “Okay, let’s bring Leia home. Follow me, I’ll take you on a bit of the scenic route.”
She slid into a ground spinner just beyond the gate, and our truck followed her down the service road into the Zoo.
Glen Eden Zoo was enormous.
Or at least it seemed so to me. Dad said it was ten times smaller than the Toronto Zoo. Even so, it was still huge.
“Mati,” Dad said. “Can you give us the skinny on this place?”
Mati, our nickname for the truck’s Maps and Travel Information computer, began reading out the information in her database, in a melodic voice:
“Glen Eden Zoological Park and Wildlife Preserve in Southwestern Ontario was founded twelve years ago by Drs. Judith and Louis Weston, co-founders of Weston Analytics. Louis Weston, an aerospace pioneer who founded Weston Aerolite, passed away two years ago, from bone cancer.”
Not having travelled far from the service entrance yet, we were in rugged terrain, winding down gravel roads that traced the shoreline of Kelso Lake, surrounded by fields with overgrown grass, trees with a glorious overhang of autumn, marked occasionally with what looked like small construction sites.
“Glen Eden is home to a number of varied animal species, including currently viable, endangered and previously extinct mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and invertebrates.”
Suddenly, the vista opened and, while Mati’s voice continued in the background, Judith’s spinner began to lead us through an extravagant safari.
“While the list varies over the years, mammalian species at Glen Eden Zoo include: African lion, Amur tiger, jaguar, panther, Masai giraffe, river hippopotamus, tapir, capybara, Yemen and Saudi gazelles, scimitar oryx, African pygmy goat, Carpathian lynx, grey and Iberian wolves, Asian short-clawed otter, vervet monkey, marmoset, ring-tailed coati, Bennett's and Parma wallabies, New Zealand greater short-tailed and Christmas Island pipistrelle bats, reindeer, Pere David’s deer, and Grant’s, Burchell’s, and Grevy’s zebras.”
Later on, I would find out that this was what Leia was, a Grevy’s zebra who had somehow gotten loose, and wandered further out than anyone had expected.
Beyond a clutch of tall grasses, a river hippopotamus stomped and grunted. Further down the path, two giraffes scissored their necks against the morning sky.
“Reptilian species at the Zoo include: Western hog nose snake, royal python, red-tailed boa constrictor, Round Island burrowing boa, bearded dragon, crested gecko, blue-tongued and Cape Verde giant skinks, blue spiky lizard, and the yellow-headed and electric-blue gecko. Amphibians at Glen Eden include: axolotl, African bullfrog, harlequin and golden toads, Sri Lanka shrub, Australian torrent, golden mantella, and poison dart frogs, and the Yunnan Lake newt.”
Down in a shallow valley where the road branched away from us, we saw glass-walled buildings, enormous terraria, and an aviary that towered like a cathedral in the landscape.
“Glen Eden Zoo’s collection of birds include: ostrich, American white, straw-necked and Jamaican ibis, cassowary, emu, helmeted guinea fowl, great grey, great horned and burrowing owls, white-naped crane, greater rhea, avocets, crested and red-throated caracara, Himalayan monal, avocet, and bar-winged and New Caledonian rail.”
In a brief span of time in travelling from the service gate to where we were, our path had circumnavigated the world in all its splendor and majesty—African savanna, Siberian tundra, Malaysian jungle, forests and grasslands, jungles and wetlands, rainforest and coast.
“Invertebrates at the Zoo include: leaf insects, Brazilian, Chilean and Indian tarantula, whip and deathstalker scorpion, spined dwarf mantis, giant thorny stick insect, Kona giant looper and American chestnut moths, giant thorny stick insect, and the Mbashe river buff, Morant’s blue and Xerces blue butterflies.”
I remember wondering if Mati would ever run out of bits of data on Glen Eden.
“Thanks, Mati,” Dad said, and she stopped.
We stopped too, finally, at two-story building made of brick and glass. Over the entryway, a sign proclaimed:
Wildlife Health Centre
Right beside this building was a tract of land dotted with construction equipment and heavy machinery. I would learn later on that this was the site was being developed for a new animal health centre and research and development institute, CIRCE, the Canadian Institute for Research in Conservation Ecology.
Judith was on her phone, and presently a young man in khakis came out of the building to
take Leia away.
“The Force is with you,” I said, as I gave Leia a hug and let her go. My Dad didn’t even try to hide his sigh of relief.
Judith smiled. “You may have saved a life today,” she said to me. She knelt down to my eye level, and fished a business card from her pocket. On the back of it, she wrote, in a fine print:
To Zara Harbridge –
Free entry to Glen Eden Zoo forever.
Life is beyond value, beyond measure.
Judith Weston
She signed it with a flourish and presented it to me.
“Welcome,” she said. “Welcome to the Zoo.”
3
Last of the Dinosaurs
We returned Leia to Glen Eden just over eight-and-a-half years ago.
I’ve held on to that business card ever since, used it to bypass the lines on many occasions when I was a simply a visitor to Glen Eden. I still carried it in my wallet, later when I was officially on staff at the Zoo. I’ve written that singular phrase about the immeasurable value of life in diaries and journals, on calendars for myself and in cards to friends, a mantra of strength.
The Chinese say that the main attribute of a dragon is strength. They also say that strength without the ability to bend with fortune leads to destruction.
Three years after my first visit to Glen Eden came the first announcement that a new, bright object had been discovered in the Kuiper belt. A minor asteroid, an unnamed comet, a chunk of ice and rock, a piece of news that appeared, if at all, as the science filler in newscasts, to be missed by a world busy with the Colonial War or with its daily routine of surviving, or ignored.
Besides, at that time, Gabriel’s Comet was one of thousands of comets and asteroids in the sky around us, with nothing remarkable to set it apart from the rest. No one yet knew the one thing that made it different from all the rest—that it was headed in a huge, heavenly arc straight for us. That providence had already engineered a collision course with the Earth.
But I didn’t ignore it. As with the star in the sky of Bethlehem, I took the appearance of the Comet as an omen, a sign from the heavens that nothing would be the same—because simultaneously with the appearance of that, alas, ominous new star, the same misfortune brought to us my father’s death.
Aunts and uncles and cousins that lived on the west coast, five hours away, in British Columbia, came only to attend the graveside service.
When my brother left us for the United Earth Force—his new family, I smirked at him—to fight in the Colonial War, my mother was all that I had left to keep me strong, for a time. Although she constantly talked to Paul by deep space messaging, I, in turn, was essentially all she had here on Earth.
Two dragons, trying to bend with fortune.
Somehow, I made it through high school without giving Mom a heart attack. Eventually I outgrew hanging around with boys, the Maui wowie and Acapulco gold vaping, and the occasional late-night partying. Despite my shenanigans, my grades were decent, and I eked out an acceptance letter from the University of Guelph.
With an imposing reference letter from Judith Weston—director at Glen Eden, but signing as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Weston Analytics, and Managing Director of CIRCE—I had an offer for financial support that came with an undergraduate research and study program at the Gosling Research Institute for Biodiversity.
For once, my mother was happy.
The parents of Jacqui and Eliza, red-headed twins who were both in my high-school graduating class, were members of the Boulevard Club, a private sports and social club along the shore of Lake Ontario, where we held our graduation party.
“Mrs. Harbridge,” they said, when we arrived. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Call me Anne,” said my mother, beaming in her batik gown.
I got Paul’s message as hors d'oeuvres were being served:
Sic itur ad astra
Such is the pathway to the stars. It was Paul’s personal motto, shared with the Royal Canadian Air Force, one of the peacekeeping units attached to the UEF, the United Earth Force. Dad’s personal motto was Per ardua ad astra, an earlier RCAF motto that I still held on to: Through adversity to the stars.
We’d seen much of that.
The first time I heard Paul use that phrase was the night I’d first seen shooting stars. That was when I was nine. I didn’t know then that he was thinking of joining the UEF—to fight the War, to live independently, to lessen the load on Mom, I don’t know what all his reasons were. If I’d known he was leaving, I would have held on to him tighter than anything.
Because of Dad’s passing, we’d had to move to a bungalow outside Mississauga. That night, Mom was in Toronto, visiting with her sister where some of our things were still stored. I was supposed to be in bed.
But I was really, truly, actually in my bed, snuggled with a stuffed Totoro, pleased after a dinner of microwaved Chef Angelo spaghetti and vege-meatballs—the pinnacle of my brother’s culinary expertise—my teeth brushed and gleaming. My brother was slack-jawed in front of the television downstairs, and Sansa Ackerman’s dubbed voice from the Return to Titan anime was beginning to infiltrate the static of my dreams.
Then I heard the back door open, footsteps running to my brother’s bedroom, then running outside again.
I sat up. I could hear Sansa yelling and the roar of a gargantuan Titan, but something was off. I went downstairs, and found the TV playing to an empty sofa.
Paul was leaning against the deck railings, looking up at the sky through binoculars. I peered up, and gasped.
From East to West, a streak of light creased the night sky like stars suddenly unfastened from their heavenly quilt.
“Shooting star!” I gasped.
There was one more, and then another, in quick sequence.
“Meteors,” Paul said, handing me the binoculars he’d run to his room for. “Pieces of rock and dust, burning in our atmosphere.”
I gaped through the lenses.
Paul loved looking at the stars. He was just finishing high school at St. Mike’s, and science was his best subject. He was either going to be an astronomer or cosmologist someday—that, or a Jedi. That was what we all thought at the time.
“There’s this comet,” he says. “It’s called Swift-Tuttle, named after whoever found it. It’s a huge thing, about 26 kilometers wide. It makes an enormous orbit through the galaxy, and every so often comes close to the Earth.”
“That’s the comet burning?” I ask, pointing to the sky.
“Not really,” he says. “The comet itself swings by the Earth around once every 133 years and misses us by quite a lot. Every year at about this time in August, the Earth passes through all the debris the comet leaves behind. The debris is the meteor shower. They call it the Perseid meteor shower.”
We watch the display for a moment in silence.
“Sic itur ad astra,” he said.
“Huh?”
He was silent, for what was a very long time. Much later, I realized that he was thinking about the Academy, about the RCAF and the UEF, about his place among the stars, away from Earth, away from here. “It’s Latin,” he said, finally. “Such is the pathway to the stars.”
He didn’t turn out to be an astronomer or cosmologist; what he did become was a soldier and navigator assigned to the starship UES Horikoshi, with multiple tours of Jupiter’s moons Europa and Titan. Not quite the same thing, but I guess he was still where his heart belonged.
Return to Titan. In the future, he’d laugh when he told us of this assignment. We didn’t.
I continued looking through the binoculars. “What would happen if it hit us?”
“The comet itself?”
“Yup, Comet Swift-what?”
“Swift-Tuttle. Well, NASA keeps a close watch on anything that might possibly hit us, of course—comets, asteroids, you name it. Right now they don’t think there’s anything that’s even coming close. So… no worries.”
We watched a little longer.
&
nbsp; “But has something like that ever hit us before?”
Paul thought a bit.
“They say the dinosaurs were wiped out by a comet kind of like this one, hitting the Earth. You can still the massive crater it created, somewhere in Mexico. That’s how they know.”
I turned that over in my mind.
“So the comet that killed the dinosaurs, that was much bigger than this one, right?”
“Um, no,” he says. “Actually, Comet Swift-Tuttle is almost three times bigger.”
I gasp.
“But don’t worry,” he says. “It’ll miss us by a mile. Millions and millions of miles, actually.”
We continued to watch in silence. I tried to imagine how big 26 kilometers was, something as big as our city, from end to end. I pictured the size of the crater that it would make.
How far would you have to go to escape? What part of the destruction could you escape? Barring leaving Earth, was escape even possible?
Still, I was reassured by what Paul had said, and continued to watch. Until Paul left to join the Academy, we never missed the watching the Perseid meteor shower together.
4
See You Later Alligator
Swift-Tuttle will never hit the Earth, not in my lifetime at least.
There were some predictions that forecast a hit in the year 2126. Better data from deep space sensors and better calculations accounting for all the cosmological effects on Swift-Tuttle—including the gravity of the sun and all the planets—allowed scientists to put together complete enough a picture to rule out the possibility that Swift-Tuttle would impact the Earth in 2126. Instead, it would miss the Earth by 23 million kilometers.
But if a comet the size of Swift-Tuttle did hit the Earth, the impact energy would be about 300 times that of the object that wiped out the dinosaurs. Hurtling through space at more than 150 times the speed of sound, about 58 kilometers a second, an impact by this celestial chunk of rock and ice would be devastating.
