A visit to the past

I went somewhere today, that I haven`t been since I was a child ! And what different views I had of it.

Being on holiday this week I decided to go to the city, Norwich to have a wander around the shops. I set off fairly early this morning, and getting off the bus in the centre of the city by the castle, I suddenly thought I haven`t been in here for years and years, I`ll go in there before I do my shopping. Having paid my entrance fee - which came as a bit of a shock(!) as it used to be free in my childhood, I wandered around. Obviously over the years there had been a lot of changes and I enjoyed taking in again the history, and it really set me thinking about the way in which the people of hundreds of years ago had had skill and initiative in the making of primitive tools, and things for their everyday life. But what a hard life it had been.

As a child I had always been fascinated to go and look at the display cases of scenes with actual birds and animals in them, albeit that they were stuffed ones. It used to be my favourite part of a visit to the museum. On going into that section today - I found it was set out exactly as it had been 50 years or so ago, not a single thing had changed, except it looked perhaps a bit dustier and rather dated - but instead of enjoying looking at the displays today I found myself appalled by them.
To think that birds and animals had been caught, killed and then stuffed just so that we could look at them in glass cases was a nauesating sensation. How could we (humans) be so cruel as to do that?
In one hall there was a whole room full of cases round the wall full of different birds, and against some buzzards was a card saying that these were now an almost extinct bird-- It made me want to say maybe if they hadn`t have caught them to stuff and put in a museum (and I guess this isn`t the only museum to have such a collection) there would still be the birds about today.