A visit to the zoo can be an exasperating experience; you find yourself staring at a plastic plaque giving you the animal’s common name, then the ‘genus species’, then a short summary of where it’s from and its preferred habitat. Your eyes then scan the enclosure and find nothing on first pass. You then turn your attention to potential hiding zones - inside logs, beneath leaves or in some moss-encrusted concrete hidey-hole at the back of the enclosure. With luck you may see the tip of a tail protruding from the creature’s chosen retreat. The reptile house always seems to have at least 80% of its occupants out of sight and not to mention being highly camouflaged and completely immobile. They may as well be part of the scenery anyway. I have suspected that this is in part due to zoo staff messing with your head by leaving some enclosures empty while omitting to place a notice to say the animal is 'on holiday', but also that reptiles, in particular, are especially introverted and shun the limelight like some scaly version of Howard Hughes.
The problem is that introverted animals don’t make good viewing. You need extraverts in the zoo environment - monkeys or predators that don’t give a fuck who sees them, or animals too big to hide without looking stupid (ever seen an elephant quivering behind a bush?). The problem with being an extrovert in the animal kingdom is that you tend to stand out and all the camouflage in the world is not going to help. Extravert quarry need to be cocky agile bastards that can make a quick bolt when threatened. If you’re not fleet-footed then you get eaten and you can take time to ponder the Darwinian irony as some sharp-toothed predator chews your head off.
To compound matters those kill-joy zoo officials won’t even let you feed the animals these days, not even with things of no nutritional value such as chewing gum or sticks. If the zoo encouraged visitors to feed the animals they could cut their overheads through reduced food bills. The introverted animals would be forced out into the open to beg for scraps, the animals would be fed sweets and crisps by obese British children and would soon become overweight themselves, reduced to immobile amorphous lumps of fur, scales and claws for the paying public to view in voyeuristic unfettered access. Everybody wins.
