Until recently if you asked me, “Mr. Heaton” (you do not have permission to call me by my Christian name) “What is the best zoo on the entire planet?” I would have responded with, “Why, Little River Zoo in Norman, Oklahoma.” Because Little River Zoo was populated entirely by animals rejected by better zoos.
I visited the place on several occasions in college, sometimes with a date and once with my little brother. Every trip was astounding because each time we would discover new and glorious animals that had turned out to be terrible pets (like alligators or bobcats) and had been donated to the zoo. Sometimes when you purchased your ticket at the gift shop they would have baby mountain lions or lynx kittens that some idiot dropped off after deciding to buy a labrador retriever instead. Because the zoo was so small, they weren’t terribly hung up on protocol, so they’d just hand you the little claw monster and chat a bit about how when it grew up it could jump four stories vertically and is attracted to the cries of human children.
Have you ever wanted to pet a kangaroo? Well, you could at Little River. Because ours was blind. Another zoo generously donated Billy, a slightly defective kangaroo, who mostly sat around eating vegetables while the tiny herd of other functional kangaroos hopped around several yards away using the gift of sight. So if you felt like petting a kangaroo you could just ask the zoo keeper and they’d let you in through a gate and you could give Billy a little pat on the head.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
It’s also worth noting that Little Rivers is effectively the retirement home for all of America’s organ grinding monkeys. Sadly, due to willowy federal regulations about owning and importing monkeys, you don’t see a lot of organ-grinding Capuchins anymore. But back in the fifties it was completely respectable to buy a hand-cranked musical apparatus and then capture a small jungle animal and teach it to sputter out “Camptown Races” in exchange for bananas and cigars. The only legal requirement was that you grow a handle-bar mustache.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
So where did all of these plucky little musicians go when their owners succumbed to heart-attacks or the ebola virus? They all went to Little River Zoo.
There were several monkey cages teeming with musically literate, hilarious Capuchin monkeys. I say “hilarious” because I swear the monkeys had developed senses of humor. I remember one occasion when my brother and I took a personal tour and the monkeys made a game of trying to grab the zoo keeper’s breasts whenever she went by. It wasn’t some inadvertent attempt to merely touch a human, either. These were assertive, focused efforts to a cop a feel.
Very likely the most amazing conversation I’ve ever had in my entire life revolved around “monkey security” at Little River Zoo. I mentioned to our guide that, overall, the monkey facilities didn’t exactly appear to be Alcatraz. If the monkeys were smart enough to fake heart attacks until our guide got close enough for them to grope her boobs, wasn’t it only a matter of time before they stole her car keys or whittled shivs out of box springs and took a hostage?
I am not making this up. I am paraphrasing, but I am not making this up:
“Well, sometimes the big one, Goliath, does manage to get out. About once a year. So when that happens we leave bottles of schnapps around the park for him. Eventually he passes out and we drag him back into the cage.”
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Isn’t that amazing!? The fact that our local zoo literally had an alcoholic monkey retrieval policy restored my love of humanity for at least half a year.
Unfortunately due to lack of funding Little River Zoo, the greatest zoo in the history of mankind, closed in December of last year. It’s still limping on as a private animal shelter, but this is mostly because no sane zoo would accept its animals. Billy the Blind Kangaroo and Goliath the Schnapps-Loving, Organ-Grinding Monkey were by my lights spectacular attractions on par with Bob Newhart or that magician who can fly. Other zoos for some reason do not see them as billable attractions.
And a few are too fragile to contemplate anything as rigirous as relocating to a different zoo and integrating into new bridge groups and rotary clubs and things. For instance, Mickey Pierce, the zoo’s director, noted that one monkey named Darwin “doesn’t have all of his fingers. Kind of got some broken teeth. He’s subject to strokes. So he probably wouldn’t make the move.” Poor Darwin. You should have seen him in his heyday. Nobody could crank out “Pop Goes the Weasel” like Darwin.
Readers, I rarely express legitimate human emotion on my blog, but when I discovered that Little River Zoo shut its doors to the public I grew teary and wistful. What a travesty. I would have gladly consented to carpet bombing several less interesting places in Oklahoma in order to keep Little River Zoo operational. And I mean entire towns.
 Andrew Heaton is a writer and standup comedian in New York City. If this post made you laugh or think, kindly "like" it on Facebook.