The Marshmallow Bears
The marshmallow bears are on junk food missions, soft gelatine stuck to their oily prickly
backs. Sluggish and overweight in their hearts, people could throw lollies if they wanted
to. Cages for bears have logs and other climbing apparatus, rotated on a regular basis for
mental stimulation. It's similar to moving furniture around in your living room, but never
leaving the house. There are curious people looking in through the kitchen window and
tapping on the glass, whilst you climb the couch in its new corner. "The Zoo should stop
feeding marshmallows to the marshmallow addicts," said a solitary protestor. The bears
show signs of torn ears and nostrils as a result of competing for marshmallows thrown by
tourists. Now every time I get given a marshmallow with a vegan hot chocolate in a
Brunswick street cafe, I not only think of the gelatine, of the cows with loose footing
sliding in blood on the ramps, their hoofs inside the pink and white sponge, but I think of
the bitten faces of bears addicted to sugar. All this for a marshmallow thrown into the
ashtray. As I live longer, more and more memories will become associated with
marshmallows. By the end of my life, I'll know so much about the suffering behind
marshmallows, that it will be hard to sit in a cafe and receive one. They will become very
heavy inside with association and memory. I will have dreams of receiving them and
being unable to push them away. My body and mind grows weary but society's demand for
marshmallows increases. More hoofs of cows and ex-racehorses are needed as the binding
agent. More marshmallows are required at trendy urban cafes and zoos where the bears
have lost a lot of teeth to cavities, and where their purpose is to fight it out for the
starch and sugar. There must be another planet in a constellation that places ethics above
lollies. Will two orphan bear cubs be condemned to a lifetime of begging for marshmallows
from tourists at a popular animal park? But Marineland owner John Holer said that the
public were misinformed when they criticise the quality of life of bears in his park. "We
have the best bear facilities in the whole country," said Holer, describing the enclosure as
a two acre area with fibreglass caves, a built-in plastic swimming lake, play rock
formations and two well-balanced daily meals of pink and white marshmallows. "These
animals should be placed in a sugar detoxification centre," said Eliza Dixon of ZooCheck.
"The bears at the park suffer physical and mental scars from overcrowding and a poor diet
of unlimited marshmallows." But Holer maintains that the stress occurred when they
mainly didn't get the flavour that they wanted. "We try to offer a varied diet of pink and
white," he said. "Sometimes they get pink and other times they get white, then we
reverse that pattern to maintain the bears' interest. The bears would get depressed if we
stopped feeding them gelatine. A depressed bear isn't a pretty sight and besides the
marshmallows are of a particularly good quality. Even my own children don't get given
marshmallows as good as these! The bears would have no such luck in finding such good
quality marshmallows in the wild. Marshmallows are now extinct in the wild." |
