When my son was 2 1/2, we visited the zoo. I got distracted for just a moment, and when I looked up, my son was climbing over a wall and into the lion's den. One foot was hanging over the king of the jungle's water hole.

I ran to pull him back from his suicide mission as he wailed his discontent. The two teenagers who had been standing right next to him spoke as if they had just stepped out of an old Bill and Ted movie.

"I was like, whoa, that baby is catnip."

The other laughed. "Catnip."

Yeah, I'm gonna guess catnip wasn't the grass they smoked before the zoo visit.

Kids and zoos, though delightful in theory, always seemed like a death march.

Here, young, impressionable child, who is much faster than I, can squeeze his body into any hole like a mouse and loves doing the exact opposite of everything I say, enjoy watching this massive man-eating tiger. And remember, don't go in there.

Yeah, right! We are practically daring them to be dined upon.

Once, at another zoo, orangutans were enraged by the crowd. There was a new crop of baby orangutans, and I believe that the mothers were feeling anxious. One mother, at the end of her rope, threw poop at the crowd.

I didn't fault her; in fact, I felt her. I don't know that feces would have been my go-to choice, but heaven knows there were times in those new-mommy months when I felt the urge to grab nearly anything in reach and chuck it at irritating gawkers: a baby bottle, a breast pump, a small dog, my baby's diaper. (OK, so maybe feces were on the table, just not my own.)

I pulled my kids away from the railing. Sure, I didn't want to agitate the mama primate more, but also, I was terrifyingly aware of the fact that we did not have a change of clothes should my kids become the next victim of gravity-defying excrement.

So did they back away? No! Of course not! My kids, who actually had not been part of the original problem, now joined a chorus of other kiddos (in a seemingly choreographed exercise of parental defiance) and began taunting our distant cousins. And oh, how the poo rained down.

I once heard a crotchety old neighbor say that kids don't belong at zoos; they belong in them. The children, he said, should be escorted into cages or rooms with windows while the animals walk freely around them.

At the time, I thought this man a Scrooge. Now, in retrospect, Scrooge was actually a genius. How else could he have accumulated all that money and such delightful gravy puns?

Today I had the pleasure(?) of chaperoning my 5-year-old's school class to the local zoo. I spent most of the morning maniacally counting the 22 children in tow. John Nash would have nothing on me. I learned each child's name and made mental groupings of gender, hair color, jacket color and shirt under the jacket color, ensuring that we kept an eye on every single Goldfish-breath tyke.

You may find this responsible chaperoning, but you haven't seen our zoo. To understand that my obsessiveness was unnecessary, you must first understand that our zoo is actually just a rescue for animals that cannot be rereleased. It's... tiny. The No. 1 animal found at our zoo?

The terrifying, ferocious turtle.

Look, I'm no scientist, and there is still a decent chance that with so many turtles at the zoo, one could very likely be a snapping turtle. Hello... danger! I don't want Felicity, the sweet little girl with braids in her hair, to become Four-Fingered Felicity on my watch! The zoo also has black bears (behind a fully fenced-in enclosure) and an alligator (that honestly has never moved in all my many visits and I'm now thinking may be stuffed.)

After petting a corn snake and visiting every exhibit in our small rescue zoo, the children huddled together for a picnic.

We had survived. Not a single child had gone missing, been injured or tried to climb into a predator's den.

After snack, we played tag. I chased after the children, pretending to be a monster. My kid and his friend smacked right into each other, bashing their heads together.

"Your monster made me get hurt," my kid wailed.

So much for this zoo's not being dangerous.

Katiedid Langrock is author of the book "Stop Farting in the Pyramids," available at http://www.creators.com/books/stop-farting-in-the-pyramids. Like Katiedid Langrock on Facebook, at http://www.facebook.com/katiedidhumor. To find out more about her and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: at Pixabay