My Trip to the Zoo

Hunter and I decided to take our trip to the zoo as a finals break on Monday. Originally, I was a little skeptical whether or not there would be a lot of people there considering it was cloudy, windy, and a Monday morning. Fortunately right when we pulled in Hunter and I noticed almost a dozen school buses. This was a good sign. 

Right when we entered the park we headed over to the first exhibit there: the gorillas. Here, all the kids climbed up on the edge of the fence to get as close to the animals as they could. 

As it turned out, this attraction proved to cause the most laughter out of all the places at the zoo. The kids here seemed to be chuckling nearly the whole time, however, whenever an animal would do something that they thought was funny, the kids would burst out in uncontrollable laughter. The video below captures this excellently. 

Another moment of laughter that I captured occurred in the bird cage. The baby, pictured below, couldn't help but laugh as he reached out to touch the bird. All of the young kids seemed to be so enthralled, yet confused by the animals that their first reaction was to laugh. 

As far as the question of whether or not laughter is contagious, the answer is easy: yes. Nearly all of the laughter I observed at the zoo was a group of kids cracking up. Further, whenever all of the little kids would laugh, it was nearly impossible for the parents/ adult supervisors to not start chuckling themselves. Kids' laughing definitely caused Hunter and I to. 

I really enjoyed this assignment. It was a great study break for this extremely stressful week and enabled us to observe laughter from a different viewpoint. 

Below I attached a picture of Hunter becoming one with the gorilla.