The American passion for beasts peaks at an exotic equestrian show in New York. By SALLY ECKHOFF americans do shocking things to get close to animals. People go to national parks and march up to wild beasts in defiance of all common sense. We're also famous for climbing into polar bear cages, leaving entire fortunes to cats, putting goldfish into our shoes and pythons around our necks. Our desire to underwrite our affections leads us to spend $20 billion a year on pets. We have a lot invested in animals in this country, and the passion we nourish at such great expense is shot through with misgivings, frustrations and sometimes outright fear. The urge to be near animals has all the qualifications of a major national obsession. It certainly raises provocative questions, some of them relatively new. It's intriguing that our craving for beasts is so noticeably strong at a time when computers get the lion's share of credit for keeping everyone informed and amused. If you base your assessment solely on how people spend their time, you'd expect that the public's number one entertainment icon — next to whichever pop star is ruling the charts — to be some kind of gadget. However, animals are doing big business at the box office, too. More than that, they're moving, herdlike, to the center of our collective imagination. Beyond the enormous success of the movie "Babe" and the multitude of animal books that have made the New York Times' bestseller list, recently constructed animal attractions have been unprecedented in both imagination and expense. Some examples: Sea World opened an arctic substation in — where else? — Florida, trucking in polar bears, seals and almost a million gallons of man-made brine; the Monterey (California) Aquarium built a spectacular, much-praised, 56-foot-long fishwatching window. Even the Mall of America in Minneapolis got into the act by building a giant tank with a glass tunnel in the bottom, so you can stroll through with your shopping bags and watch sharks finning through a liquid sky over your head. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Next: Soothing the savage New Yorker

Pictured above: A scene from Chimere, performed by Zingaro and directed by Bartabas.