List: '5 reasons you shouldn't take your kids to the zoo...'

Today’s ‘List Friday’. In Australia at least, what used to be called censorship is now called a more polite (i.e. sanitised) word: classification. Within the National Classification Scheme, the process of classification’s undertaken by a Classification Board [1] – an independent statutory body that assigns films, computer games and publications to one of six classifications (pictured) [2]. If a Board classification’s challenged, the Board’s decision’s reviewed by – you’ve guessed it – the Classification Review Board [3]. All of which may be irrelevant because, I think, the National Classification Scheme doesn’t apply to non-game internet content. But hypothetically if it did, I’d be keen to see how the Board would classify today’s list. It’s titled ‘5 reasons you shouldn't take your kids to the zoo…’ [4]. Darling Emily sent it to me last Monday, in an email asking ‘A blog list perhaps?’ How could a father refuse his daughter? It is, by my reckoning, my first pictorial list. On one level it’s pretty funny; but on another level it’s just what animals do. We Homo sapiens animals have no claim whatever to the least skerrick of wisdom, judgement, or classification, in relation to what non Homo sapiens animals do. So why the list’s titled ‘5 reasons you shouldn't take your kids to the zoo…’ is totally beyond my ken.

P.S. Thanks, Em. xx