Julie Jay: Don’t feed the animals at the zoo unless the animals are your children

Once we can leave the perennial question of the morality of zoos at the door, we can all enjoy a fun day out (just bring your own snacks)

It is no mean feat surviving a day at the zoo, but overall we did pretty well. We came, we saw, we ate the snacks we had brought from home, because this is not mammy’s first rodeo.

I have been threatening to bring the kids to the zoo for a while now, and this week was the week I put my money (€75 to be precise) where my mouth is and headed to the Phoenix Park.

En route, we spotted an exciting Garda escort coming from the Áras.

“That’s probably Michael D Higgins,” I told the kids with confidence, keeping my references current. Forget the internet, the real disinformation threat my children are facing is my own inability to follow current affairs that don’t revolve around reality TV stars winning £50,000 for coupling up on an island in Mallorca.

Enjoying the zoo does require a certain level of cognitive dissonance: obviously we all know giraffes are better suited to the African plains than an enclosure round the back of the criminal court; but once you leave morality at the door, everyone can have a nice time. 

When asked before entering which animal he most wanted to see, the kids’ father announced “seals”, a strange choice given we could see them any day of the week at home in West Kerry, but an admirably achievable goal nonetheless. The kids went for the obvious heavyhitters: Lions! Elephants! Which you would think would be hard to miss, but somehow we managed to do just that on our previous trip to the zoo two years ago.

For anyone looking to get bikini ready for Christmas, may I suggest to you a trip around the zoological gardens. I clocked up a 12,000 step count, a count so high you’d swear I was running from a tiger.

The nocturnal house was a departure from the usual zoo attractions, but I couldn’t help feel a little jealous of these monkeys who got to kip during the day. Plus, it makes for a bit of a dull encounter. 

They really should allow anyone who has purchased a family ticket a sneaky midnight trip back in purely to see what these little guys get up to. If the impressively minimalist state of their house is anything to go by, it would appear to be a lot of decluttering. I’m determined to get their feng shui secrets.

By the end though, I was pretty pooped, and not of the humongous brown rhino variety. “Oh look wolves!” my husband happily announced, dragging us backwards instead of forwards as I announced I was officially all zoo-ed out and was fairly sure we would soon be able to see wolves anytime if the Green Party had anything to do with it.

Admittedly, my confidence that some environmentally-minded politician somewhere suggested the re-introduction of wolves into the Irish landscape is fairly shaky. In fact, come to think of it, I think I might have dreamt the whole thing, but either way, there is no time for fact-checking when you’ve reached your limit and the stroller snacks are running dangerously low.

The only way I could get my kids to actually leave the place was to suggest a trip to the gift shop, where we picked up a teddy for the toddler and a book about animal facts for the nearly six-year-old, skipping over the chapter on reproduction, which I look forward to reading with him before he heads off to college.

“I remember scanning you in,” said the lovely young man manning the exit, “you really got the day out of it”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that for €75, I was disappointed to be leaving without a penguin — though I knew from his tone he was more congratulating me than anything else. It is no mean feat surviving a day at the zoo, but overall we did pretty well. We came, we saw, we ate the snacks we had brought from home, because this is not mammy’s first rodeo.

When asked what his favourite part of the zoo was, the five-year-old announced “the gift shop”, which to be fair is always the best part of every educational experience. 

Pressing him for his favourite animal, he declared the wooly mammoth, and he was not for budging despite my insistence that wooly mammoths, like line-dancing in Ireland, are very much dead in the water. Or more specifically, the ice.

As the night wore on, I eventually declared I was totally wrong, that wooly mammoths were indeed alive and well and available for viewing in Phoenix Park, and I would never dare fact check him again.

Accurate? No. But never let accuracy get in the way of a great story, especially when you’re 12,000 steps in and trying to get your nocturnal beasts to quit the monkey business and go to bed. A mammoth task indeed — it probably would been easier to get a penguin to bed, but sadly I couldn’t get it past security.