Life of Pi: Chapters 1–15

I had the great luck one summer of studying the three-toed sloth in situ in the equatorial jungles of Brazil. It is a highly intriguing creature. Its only real habit is indolence. It sleeps or rests on average twenty hours a day.

It is a highly intriguing creature. Its only real habit is indolence. It sleeps or rests on average twenty hours a day.

I would have received the Governor General’s Academic Medal, the University of Toronto’s highest undergraduate award, of which no small number of illustrious Canadians have been recipients, were it not for a beef-eating pink boy with a neck like a tree trunk and a temperament of unbearable good cheer.

When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.

I have nothing but the fondest memories of growing up in a zoo. I lived the life of a prince. What maharaja’s son had such vast, luxuriant grounds to play about? What palace had such a menagerie?

If a man, boldest and most intelligent of creatures, won’t wander from place to place, a stranger to all, beholden to none, why would an animal, which is by temperament far more conservative?

A biologically sound zoo enclosure — whether cage, pit, moated island, corral, terrarium, aviary or aquarium — is just another territory, peculiar only in its size and in its proximity to human territory.

Among zookeepers, Goliath’s death is famous; he was a bull elephant seal, a great big venerable beast of two tons, star of his European zoo, loved by all visitors.

But I learned at my expense that Father believed there was another animal even more dangerous than us, and one that was extremely common, too, found on every continent, in every habitat: the redoubtable species Animalus anthropomorphicus, the animal as seen through human eyes.

I would like to say in my own defence that though I may have anthropomorphized the animals till they spoke fluent English, the pheasants complaining in uppity British accents of their tea being cold and the baboons planning their bank robbery getaway in the flat, menacing tones of American gangsters, the fancy was always conscious.

All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt.

Mr. Hediger was for many years a zoo director, first of the Basel Zoo and then of the Zurich Zoo. He was a man well versed in the ways of animals.

It’s a question of brain over brawn. The nature of the circus trainer’s ascendancy is psychological.

It is interesting to note that the lion that is the most amenable to the circus trainer’s tricks is the one with the lowest social standing in the pride, the omega animal.

It is this compliant animal, to the public no different from the others in size and apparent ferocity, that will be the star of the show, while the trainer leaves the beta and gamma lions, more cantankerous subordinates, sitting on their colourful barrels on the edge of the ring.