Every sign, plaque and brochure at the Bronx Zoo is some version of the following:

"The magnificent creature before you will soon be EXTINCT. This may be your LAST CHANCE to see one. Even as we speak, evil Bushmeat Bullies are mutilating them with cruel barbaric traps and harvesting their nostrils, which are used as an aphrodisiac in Bhutan. Logging companies are cutting down the leafy jungle vines they would ordinarily be feasting on. Brutal sadists are hunting them for sport. The biggest hydroelectric dam in the world will soon flood all their rangeland in Ecuador, and their carcasses will float to the surface like a grotesque Sargasso Sea of Vanished Species. Warring militias in the Congo have been known to hack off their heads for superstitious reasons. Native peoples near Samarkand make an exotic soup of the forest rodents that they prey on for subsistence, and the rodents themselves are also near extinction. Once found in vast parts of Asia, Africa, Australia and Latin America, they exist in the wild only in one drainage ditch in Madagascar."

Isn't the zoo supposed to be FUN?

Do they WANT hundreds of six-year-old girls constantly bursting into tears, whining, "But, Daddy, why do people want to kill the pretty bird?"

Going to see the 4,000 animals at the Bronx Zoo is thoroughly DEPRESSING these days--and this is in spite of the fact that they've tried to make every animal enclosure some form of Wildlife Day Spa. Of course, they don't have cages anymore, except for the animals that are so small they would disappear into the foliage and never be seen by the tourists. (Apparently the marmoset doesn't have enough international wildlife publicity to merit more roaming space, and reptiles are not considered cute enough to be let out of those aquaria.) They don't even call them exhibits anymore. They are "habitats," as in the Himalayan Highlands Habitat, home of the snow leopard.

But whereas at one time you would have said, "Awww, look at his soft spotted fur," today impressionable young zoogoing children are assaulted with signs and informational displays full of doom, despair and agony. The snow leopard, they'll have you know, is "endangered throughout its range." People are killing them like crazy. They're trapping them. They're hunting them. They're getting rid of them because they're considered a livestock pest. There's a lucrative black market for snow leopard pelts. In fact, there are only 5,000 to 7,000 left in the WHOLE WORLD. IT'S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME.

You can't go anywhere on the grounds without being told JUST HOW FAST the animals are vanishing. You're constantly lectured on the poverty of Africa, the population growth rates, the "limited economic opportunities" of people who live near wild animals, the "rapidly changing political systems." What's next? A big kiosk with pictures of poachers wielding machetes against koala bears? (It's not that farfetched. The World Wildlife Federation raised a lot of money with newspaper ads showing a picked-over elephant carcass.)

In fact, let's take the elephant. The elephant is pretty much the most popular animal among children. At my local zoo in Arkansas, we had an elephant that liked to stick its trunk through the bars and swipe peanut bags out of children's hands, frightening them, making them squeal, and then, of course, delighting them. Anything today that even remotely RESEMBLES the possible touching of elephant skin to human skin would be grounds for summary dismissal from the park, not to mention that tiny bags of peanuts could possibly upset the delicate balance of the elephant's dietary regimen.

But even more annoying are the constant Elephant Lectures. Yes, we know, they poach them for ivory. Yes, we know, they rampage through villages and people shoot them. Yes, we know, LOGGERS ARE EVIL. All right, can we watch the elephant take a bath now? At the Bronx Zoo, they're especially keen on "elephant management in Laos." Laos is somehow the answer. They have these 150 elephants in a protected area in Laos that have mineral licks and grasslands and wetlands and they're happy happy elephants dwelling at one with nature. Until you get to the fine print in the explanatory brochure: the dreaded words "hydropower project" which, by 2006, will "likely increase human-elephant interaction."

Meanwhile, the animals on the INSIDE of the zoo are treated like pampered residents at a California ski resort. At the new Tiger Mountain, opening this spring, you'll be able to go "nose to nose" (through a glass pane) with Siberian tigers that are blessed with a daily "animal enrichment program" to help them "live stimulating, healthy lives." This includes an enclosure in which the tigers can turn on an automatic sprinkler whenever they feel like a quick shower, and where they can relax on heated rocks in the winter, cooled rocks in the summer. Their food will be hidden inside blocks of ice so they can get a daily workout by digging it out. They also have a suspended spinning ball with food inside. It's actually a ball within a ball, so they have to work it like a Rubik's cube before the food will fall out onto the ground. The days when big slabs of raw meat were pitchforked into a pen are apparently over. There's also a big emphasis on FORCING the cats to play with one another. They do this with chew toys, animal hides, and the equivalent of tiger catnip--musk and cinnamon scents calculated to drive them into a frenzy or, as the zoo puts it, "to keep tiger noses active."

Unfortunately, this kind of show is not anything you would ever see in China, Russia or the rest of Asia, where the tigers come from, because China's tigers--to use one example--are almost all gone. (The zoo is always politically correct in not assigning blame, but if you read between the lines, the Axis of Evil in the zoo world consists of China and Brazil. You get the impression that neither country really gives a flip about preserving species.) Pressures on the tiger include: loss of habitat, loss of prey, commercial hunting, poaching, human/tiger conflict, wildlife trade, "lack of political will and commitment to save tigers," and political instability. All of which adds up to: children in the Bronx may love tigers, but nobody who lives next to a tiger cares whether they live or die. The Chinese, for example, still use tiger parts for impotence, convulsions, skin disease and fevers. And they make a wine from tiger bones called "elixir of life." For the tiger, I suppose that would be elixir of death.

Or take the cheetah. Endangered because of "loss of habitat and human persecution," the only ones left are in sub-Saharan Africa in "very low densities" and only 50 in all of Asia, all of them in "an isolated region of Iran." (I don't think the Iranians will be accepting any American "Save the Cheetah" delegations anytime soon.) The cheetah at the Bronx Zoo kind of skulks among the bushes, never condescending to demonstrate that great speed he's known for. (Not that he could get up to Mach 1 without busting his head into a chain-link fence.)

Or consider the eastern lowland gorilla, which is threatened by . . . the cell phone! Apparently the eastern Congo has become overrun with companies mining for coltan, an alloy used in cell phones. Because there are so many mining camps now, the temptation is just too great to sneak off into the jungle and score a little gorilla-meat for the barbie. Then there are those pesky STARVING people. The Congolese government finally gave up and disarmed the park guards at the Kahuzi Biega National Park to avoid bloodshed with famished villagers taking gorillas for . . . uh . . . survival.

Another tip if you're going near the zoo any time soon: never use the word "jungle." These animals don't live in jungles. They live in a tropical rainforest ecosystem. (Insert here nine paragraphs about how we should be preserving the rainforest.) In Gabon, however, intrepid explorers recently discovered a forest clearing--in other words, an ABSENCE of rainforest--for which they instantly put out an order of protection. There were elephants, "naive" gorillas, chimps, forest antelope and other wildlife frolicking Eden-style in this "micro-ecosystem" called the Langoue Bai where there were NO TREES. So apparently we're to preserve the rainforest and also the ABSENCE of rainforest wherever it's found to be an absence of rainforest that wasn't caused by cutting down the rainforest.

But what about the woodpecker? The woodpecker NEEDS those dead trees. And in order to get dead trees, you have to sort of, uh, destroy the trees. But there's a problem. Insensitive humans invented these organizations called fire departments that put out wildfires and put them out fast. Not only that, they get rid of pests that destroy crops. So the forest can't burn down, and the loggers cart off all the available wood anyway, and the pests aren't there to burrow into the dead limbs, and so now we need to send people to Oregon and northeastern California to knock down some trees and put some pests in them so we can help out the woodpecker.

It's all too too confusing. You can go down the list of attractions--the mandrill, that baboon with the blue and red face, travelling in packs of EIGHT HUNDRED in Gabon but found nowhere else in the world (this is the nasty beast that kept trying to kill Alan Bates in "In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro"); the Chinese alligator, wild population less than 130, most living in drainage ditches and farm ponds (of course there's a whole SLEW of them at the Bronx Zoo); the jaguar, which kills the cattle in Venezuela and then gets shot by angry ranchers, threatened by agriculture and human settlement so that they can't roam all over the place anymore; the Eld's Deer, only 42 left in the world; the black-cheeked Crested Gibbon, threatened in Laos and China because people keep eating it as a source of protein; the lemur, which evolved 35 million years ago but is now reduced to a tiny patch of Madagascar; and, speaking of Madagascar, the serpent eagle, total known population--one.

After a while, you wanna say, "PLEASE, isn't there ONE animal that's plentiful and content and healthy?" And actually there is. The Bronx Zoo is also famous for its bison herd. There were once 50 million bison in North America, but as we all know from watching "How the West Was Won," they were slaughtered by yahoos firing rifles off of moving trains. The Bronx Zoo started building a bison herd in 1899 and, with fewer than a thousand left in the wild, convinced Teddy Roosevelt to protect their rangeland. In 1907, 15 bison were shipped from the zoo to Oklahoma's Wichita Mountain Preserve. The bison made a comeback and eventually became plentiful--so plentiful that commercial cattle ranchers took an interest in them. And today there are so many that they are slaughtered en masse so that westerners can feast on Bison Burgers.

Uh oh, the girls are crying again, aren't they? Children really shouldn't be allowed in zoos. It's way too traumatic.