Saddest pictures I've ever taken

For a few days in Romania the weather turned up way too nice. 12-15 degrees Celsius outside, sometimes the Sun comes out of the clouds and the overall feeling during the day is that you can go out strolling and dreaming about spring.

It's not a normal thing and I'm close to betting that until the end of February we will have at least one more episode of freezing cold and some 50-60 centimeters of snow but because I have a kid and the kid wants to stroll through the park when the weather is nice, I had to do it.

Instead of taking her to the normal park, we decided we go visit our small zoo and "check up on the animals, how they got out of the winter". Practically they shouldn't be out of the winter. I mean the bear should be still hibernating like a boss while the safari animals should have a hard time... because you know, it's too cold for them.

I'll mention that I hate zoos. And I despise any circus that still uses alive animals to entertain people. Fortunately my country banished any kind of use of animals in circus and the moment they passed that law was one of the few that ever made me feel proud about the current state of my country. Still, the social rules and the fact that the kids usually love animals, drives me to the zoo we have in my city. It's more like an "orphanage zoo", a place that more or less got their few "exotic" animals by accepting them from places that couldn't keep them anymore or from places they couldn't adapt in. As far as I know the whole range of wild animals inside the zoo are already animals that couldn't adapt to the wilderness if set free so for their own good is better to be taken care of in a place like this one. The majority of the animals inside here are born in captivity so going here, paying the small 3 euro/ person fee, feels a little bit more like a donation to the well being of these pour souls.

There was a lot of people, given the moment of the year, in the park. Usually sobs like me, together with their little spawns, showing them the animals, instigating them to feed the animals in spite of the signs clearly telling us to do not do so.

"Go on... touch the goat!".

She didn't touch it although the small lamb, inserting its nose through the fence, was in favour of it.

Grandpa bear was not sleeping. Instead he was waving the crowds from the pit near the fence. The electrified fence kept the two worlds separated although the kids were cheering like in Disneyland. The claws on him looked sharper than my knife and this guy is practically a "backyard bear". It would take a huge amount of poking to get him to shred you to pieces but for sure he would not even sweat while at it.

A little bit further away, in a much smaller cage, the "ever walking tiger" as I call this feline, was out and doing what he's always doing: walking around in an infinite loop. I know this guy for something like two or three years already. He is a deeply scared individual. When I first met him he was doing the same looping, in his small cage, never stopping, never looking at you, without any kind of hope inside his posture. He still had his orange colour in the fur at that time. Meanwhile, he got white. Still doing his rounds while another, inferior feline, walks by his cage, casually licking its balls while stretching its limbs, enjoying sunshine and freedom.

It's an ironic depiction of unfairness in nature. While the same evolution law that drove the tiger to be top of the food chain and one of the top versions of its "feline class", it didn't stop another of its inferior, evolution tree brother to succeed and even, in this particular case, surpass the former, by sticking around a totally different branch of the mammals. Some look at the things that we, humans do, as "artificial" while if you look at it from an outside perspective, it is all part of what the law of evolution did.

It's not like we invented the damn thing...