There’s this Zoo, yeah. You following? Right.

The Zoo is owned by a hands off bloke, he kind of lets things run as the staff decide it should be run. The Zoo staff used to be managed by Boring McDour, a nice scottish bloke . The Zoo has been through some hard times recently. A few years ago a virus broke out amongst the hippos, it leaped to the big cat enclosure and before anyone knew what was going on the bears were fucked and the elephants were trying to mate with the dead. McDour did his best to limit the damage, but he ended up being thrown out when his contract ended. He couldn’t shake the virus situation even though he didn’t have much to do with it, and did a good job when it happened. People said he spent too much money on vets and fruit, so it was only natural that the operation should balls up when a bit of bother hit.

After McDour’s clean up, the customers got together and demanded that a smartly dressed young accountant, named John Bastard would get the job. People still liked McDour, but he was just so bloody dour that John Bastard got in anyway, even though they all knew John Bastard was a dickhead.

Thing was, John Bastard had a good team around him. They knew that the customers didn’t fancy paying so much to go to the zoo. The animals would be fine if they stripped back on some luxuries. People didn’t get to see when you took them out back and shot them in the face to finish them off if they were ill, all they really cared about was having a walk about the zoo in the sunshine and they happily bought John Bastard’s schtick, because they’d thoroughly convinced themselves that it was probably a good job they had any zoo to go to in the first place.

After a while, a handful of the zoo go-ers started to kick up a bit of a fuss. They had placards and they picketed a bit. The people queueing up to get in wondered what all the fuss was about. The animals had their basic necessities. They thought it was worth cutting the entrance fee if it meant that the monkeys had to lose out on a proper tire swing. They saw the protestors and thought ‘What a bunch of wankers. They should be at work, like I am half the day. I didn’t come to the zoo to be patronised by a bunch of hippies’. Meanwhile, the protestors got madder and madder at the disinterest of the zoo-goers. Why didn’t they care about the welfare of the animals? Couldn’t they see that the happier the animals were, the more efficient the zoo would be? Didn’t they realise that a few extra pounds on top of the ticket price would make everyone happier, the animals better off, ultimately leading to a rather brilliant Zoo as it once was? Nobody stood up for the protesters, really. A zoo manager named Andy Amiable challenged John Bastard for the running of the zoo, and for a while it looked like he might win. However the protesters decided that he didn’t go far enough, and called him worse names than they did John Bastard. John Bastard won a surprise victory. Andy Amiable stepped down, and a bunch of others scrambled for his old job. Who would lead the anti-bastard brigade at the zoo?

The protesters decided to take matters into their own hands. And Amiable, they thought, had lost his way. He didn’t want it badly enough. He rejected their ideas of marriage for animals, passports for fish and a free bicycle for every bipedal. They didn’t understand that the public might think they were enormous bellends, because more people would come to join the protest. To them it was a matter of time before the zoo-goers moved from the queue to the picket. All it would take was somebody who truly, truly put the animal welfare above profits. They found their man in Clive Nicebloke, a bearded 60 year old Janitor who had been kept on the fringes of the zoo for many, many years. Nicebloke was an old school zookeeper. He believed that bears had human rights, although he was deeply skeptical of the pigeons, they having bred and multiplied in the butterfly enclosure to the point where the butterfly’s only had a little box to live in. People were mostly on the pigeon’s side following the great pigeon kill off of the last century, but Nicebloke stuck firm to his principles.

There was nobody else for the protesters to back, basically. So they got Nicebloke into the job, even though Nicebloke had a potted history of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. He hung out with animal traffickers and invited them to the reptile house, because he thought it would be sensible to hear both sides of the argument. He sympathised with the Orangutan who beat Barbara Trout to death with her very own plimsole. He once told his colleagues at the Zoo that it was quite right for a stork to pick on the pigeons, because they’d caused trouble in the first place. The customers were deeply skeptical of Clive Nicebloke, but the protesters adored him.

The protesters had been warned that Nicebloke, whilst still a nice bloke, would be utterly destroyed by the cunning John Bastard and his cronies. They had 30 years of silly comments about animals, vets treating furry patients with magic water, the unfettered guilt of the pigeons. The customers watched what was going on with total confusion; in principle they kind of agreed with Nicebloke, but he was just so silly and unmagnificent compared to John Bastard that they decided to stick with what they had long before John Bastard had to go back and ask them to back him again.

Nicebloke was thrown to the wolves. As the Wolves were biting off his bits, the protesters stood aghast. How did this happen? Why didn’t anyone see this coming?

John Bastard eventually sold off so much of the zoo that the animals were pitted against one another, the weakest being eaten alive by the strongest. All the while John Bastard and his cronies clapped and jeered. The protesters began to wonder whether they were the problem all along. ‘It’s not fair!’ They shouted. It went ahead anyway, because there was nobody with any power to stop it.