I Broke This Antelope's Heart And Then He Broke Mine

I'm not a big zoo guy. I get that zoos drive awareness of species on the verge of extinction and other animal welfare-related causes, but if you've ever seen a tiger pacing nervously back and forth in her enclosure, then you know why I'm not a big zoo guy. It's a sign of madness, anxiety and stress. Can you imagine living your entire life in a fifty meter radius? Every day somebody shoves some food through a door to you and your two other friends and that's about it. Once in awhile, somebody dies and they airlift a new guy in and it starts all over again. How brutal.But I opened myself to the idea of the Safari Park. The one here in San Diego promotes conservation through the good ol' fashioned art of fucking. Well, animal fucking, anyway, although I can't say what the hell the Safari Park employees do on their breaks. But the Safari Park is one of the top breeding programs in the US. They not only maintain several species who are now extinct in the wild, but they have singlehandedly saved a few along the way. Take the august California Condor, for example. There were only 22 of those dudes left in the wild when the Safari Park swooped in and began an exhaustive breeding program, eventually releasing them back into the wild where the species now thrives.Then there's the Northern White Rhino. There are three left, all in Kenya - one male and two females. They're under armed guard 24 hours a day, thanks to the shithead poaching culture (nice job, rich white guys who compensate for their tiny dicks by throwing money around so they can kill rare, beautiful things), that has eradicated the entire species. The problem is that while one of the females is A-OK to get down, the male is old by rhino standards (43) and is likely unable to conceive, as is the other female. So when they die, the species will enter the history books as a relic of the first 4.5 billion years of Earth's life. Insert sad face here.But wait! Just when you thought all was lost, enter the Safari Park and the miracle of stem cells. See, the SP (I'm sick of typing "Safari Park") has tissue samples from fourteen northern white rhinos- tissue which can be used to generate stem cells, which EVERYBODY knows can eventually become fertilized eggs. Pop one of those bad boys into a southern white rhino female - of which there are many - and we've got a latter day Jurassic Park deal happening right under our noses. It's quite possible, if not downright likely, that the northern white rhino will make a comeback through this technology and of course, through the forward-thinking attitudes of the people who began collecting the tissue samples so long ago. (Note to future scientists- if people are on the verge of extinction and I'm old and sitting in a corner, don't you dare take any of my tissue; we people have fucked this planet up enough, thank you very much)All this to say that I have a membership to the SP and this week I took some out-of-town visitors to feed some rhinos and giraffes, to snap some pictures and most importantly, to walk off some of the sugar-powered crap we'd eaten over the long weekend. We did a caravan tour, where you hop in this open flatbed truck and ride through the wide, sprawling herbivore preserve where you get up close and personal with all sorts of plant-eating beasts (duh), birds and cute-ass furry little things that you want to stick in your backpack and take home (don't you fucking dare). Towards the end of the tour, we met up with a majestic rhino. We pulled up next to her and the guide allowed each of us to take over the chore of afternoon feeding by shoveling buckets of cored apples into her toothy, grateful mouth. It was awesome to commune with something so perfect at such close range.Hovering nearby was this old antelope who desperately wanted some apples. Of course, the rhino just wasn't having any of that, and so the antelope snuck over to the side of the truck to try his hand at begging. This season they had to remove the horns off of some of the males because they were getting a bit too feisty during the mating process, so while this guy's horns will soon be growing back (it will take 4-5 months, so he'll be rocking in the summer), for now he looks like a WWII pilot with a pair of flight goggles on his head.Anyway, we asked if we could throw a few apples to him and the guide said that we absolutely could not, as he's got shitloads of hay and grass and other stuff to eat and that to keep all of the animals' diets in line, we're only allowed to feed the one rhino. And so while I desperately wanted to feed the antelope, I respected the rules and regulations and refrained from doing so, which of course, broke his big red antelope heart.I decided to take a picture of him though and in doing so, he turned around and broke my heart just as badly. Seriously, look at his sad antelope face. If this doesn't crush your soul, then you don't have one. So there we sat - two brokenhearted dudes on a cloudy January day.A note to my sad antelope friend:If they ever give you animals wi-fi access and you find my web page, this one's for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JWTaaS7LdU