Toga - The Baby Penguin

I found this commentary, author unkown in the Daily Telegraph and wanted to repost here for you to read. I feel it expresses my sentiments perfectly. - Veronica
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Commentary
(Filed: 24/12/2005)

Curiously moved by the sad fate of a jackass penguin



By the time you read this, Toga the penguin - kidnapped on Saturday from a zoo on the Isle of Wight - will almost certainly be dead. Hope will have grown grey hairs. Hope will have mourning on.

Trenched with tears, carved with cares, hope will be 12 hours gone. And a small, fish-whiffing abductee only shin-high to a wellington boot will be casting a long, sad shadow over the nation's Christmas celebrations.

As civilians die in Iraq, the homeless curl in freezing doorways and the lonely face their traditional festival of depression and suicide - as the grave, indeed, of the late Alistair Cooke is desecrated by bodysnatchers - why, you might reasonably ask, should we so immoderately mourn a dumb animal?

Why should we have set up a special penguin hotline, offered a £10,000 reward for his safe return, put up missing posters and made tearful TV appeals to his abductors?

Aren't we being disgustingly sentimental? On one level, of course, yes we are. Could that £10,000 not be better spent on rough sleepers; or that sympathy be better spent on human beings who have been abducted and allowed to die? Hard to argue otherwise.

But to take stern and angry offence at the sentimentalisation of Toga is also to miss the point, to see things too much in black and white - like a penguin. It isn't an either/or choice. You can feel for human beings and feel for penguins: an indulgence, perhaps, but one that's little different than allowing yourself to shed a tear for an imaginary character in a film.

We allow Toga to become a symbol. He is what we have made of him imaginatively: a Christmas story - a little drama with a sad ending. By anthropomorphising him, we respond to his story as we respond to art. George Eliot wrote: "If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally."

Who could say in what complicated ways Toga's fate might serve to enlarge our sympathies? It being Christmas, after all, we are on the lookout for a paradigm of innocence: be it the Little Baby Jesus or Little Penguin Toga.

The film March of the Penguins is thought to have spurred Toga's kidnappers to their adventure; and what a cruel and idiotic adventure that was. They scaled two 6ft walls and an 8ft fence to p-p-p-pick up their penguin: a prize that could no more be sold on than a two-ton Henry Moore; that could, in fact, do no more than pine to death as their hostage.

Little percentage for them in risking capture by returning him. And, unlike a Henry Moore, he has no value as scrap.

Yet these are unusually easy creatures on which to project ourselves. (Reports more often describe Toga as "kidnapped" than "stolen".) They are at once inherently comical, waddling about in their odd little suits, yet they also appear inquisitive, bright, affectionate.

Nothing in Central Park Zoo, not even the clinically depressed polar bears, was quite so entrancing to me when I lived in New York as the penguin enclosure. You could watch them zipping into the water, twisting around at great speed and then rocketing out like little torpedoes to return to a rock, where they'd shake, flap, and look immensely pleased with themselves.

One of the most cheering news stories I ever wrote was set in that penguin enclosure: the story of Wendell and Cass, a pair of gay penguins who had coupled up in the zoo and bagged - naturally - a spacious penthouse nesting site.

These are fastidious creatures, and gregarious ones. They look after their children, like us, and gay or straight, penguins form strong and nurturing bonds. Toga's parents, Kyala and Oscar, have been ceaselessly circling the nest, wondering where he is.

Deprived of the pre-chewed fishy vittles that only they can provide, his strength will have failed, and his bodyweight dwindled. Experts tell us that, at the last - deprived of the nourishment of penguin company - his spirit, too, will have broken: "He would shiver, and hunch, and be dejected."

The jackass penguin, of which Toga is, or was, an example, does not greet its public with a cheerful "quack", as you might imagine. It says "hee-haw", like a donkey. For some reason, the faint absurdity of this makes his death the more poignant. Toga has likely hee-hawed his last. Solemn little creature.

It will be a bleak Christmas for Toga's parents, for Toga's keepers, for Toga's admirers worldwide. The congregation of New York's Pentecostal Uprise Church, which has been praying for Toga's safe return, will bow its head, perhaps, in silent remembrance.

In Canada, they will mourn. In Russia, they will light a candle. And yet in the deep permanent winter of the Antarctic, Toga's emperor penguin cousins, unmourning, will continue to circle the wagons and, in their endless white Christmas, will still gather and tend the children. Silly things, penguins. But we can still make them a symbol of hope; or, at least, of perseverance.





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