Melville

Welcome

to White Post Farms Pumpkin Patch Melville, NY. They had advertised a petting farm so I was expecting a couple goats, some pot bellied pigs, a cow or three and maybe some chickens running around... 
Instead:
A giraffe in a house (a giraffe house) smaller than my mother's
2 zebras on a dirt plot no bigger than a suburban front yard
A pig pen housing a donkey, 2 ostrich, a chicken, and 8 goats
2 bulls
A kangaroo
A dog run full of antelope
SO MANY rams on a wooden ladder
A gazelle
Lemurs
5 camels
Toucans in a small glass cage
Little ponies, like 15, tied up to fence posts and saddled up for rides around the whatever this place was

None of the cages had grass.

I asked someone who worked there where the animals go when the season is over....

They stay there. They never leave their areas. All year round, all day long they are in the same place I found them.

Their coats are matted and their feathers are dull and the sounds... screams and country music and bleating and children and screams and squeals and rattling and hooves on wood... 

I tried to replicate (very quietly and under my breath) some of the sounds and I had to stop or else I wouldn't be able to contain the sobs that were forming in me. 

Packed in tight to this very small area, they are all fed the same pellets out of ice cream cones and the sounds and the images are swirling... and then you turn around and underneath the booth that sells -

Fuck. I don't even know what the booth sold because it was made out of a glass cage full of rabbits and I tried to get to the bathroom and I tripped over a child as I looked at the birds in the net with the trees made out of plastic and the fake flowers and the fat woman holding two parrots on her hand smiling in the background of someone else's picture...

Old carnival toys everywhere. And bouncy houses. And the pumpkin patch isn't actually a pumpkin patch because the pumpkins clearly didn't grow there they're just scattered on the ground.

Enjoy the photos.