Southwick's Zoo: A Review, Part Three
Continued, as you may have guessed, from last week.
If I were asked to name a theme for Southwick's Zoo, with a two year old in tow, I would say that "Animal contact" was the theme. From the near headbutt from the elk on a train ride through the forest to the deer in the deer park licking the little guy's remarkably grubby hands, there was a whole lot of firsthand experience with the animals.
And not in a bad way. Like, say, they didn't offer walking/running/sprinting-for-your-life tours of the rhino compound. Granted, the day we went was quite hot, and the rhinos seemed lethargic (it might have been in celebration of the fast approaching father's day), so a walking tour of the rhino pen with optional contact with the rhinos may not have been the fatal incident it might have been otherwise.
Near lethal, much more lethal than rhinos, for his father, anyway, was the contact in the innocuous-looking house at the other end of the chimpanzee pen (a massive green hill with a couple trees, looking like a miniature park just for chimps). At the door, holding out a python for the little boy, who surely would want to touch the snake, was a zoo employee. Now, the boy's father... well, he could do without python's being held out at him. I did my customary check of the exits, and any walls that might look weak enough to become an exit in the near future that I do when I enter an enclosed space in which there is also one or many snakes. In this case, there were three snakes: the python, who was loose (well, loose in the sense that he was on the keeper's arm, but had the potential to spring into action and latch himself onto any passersby's face at a second's notice), a boa constrictor, and, now that I think of it, there may have been more than three. I seem to recall a red one, and another smallish black one, and then a greenish tinted one. There is a really good chance I'm imagining at least two of those, though, which is what I tend to do when enclosed in a room with a bunch of snakes in glass cages.
At any rate, touching snakes aside, there was also a tortoise, who was allowed to run free at the child's request, and he seemed nonplussed that by running free it meant that the tortoise, quite wisely, ran in her turtle fashion, away from the child in question. I'm also remembering a rabbit, which I am really certain wasn't in the room at all, and am worried that just thinking about all those snakes has skewed my memory of the event entirely, and so, in the narrative of the review, we're going to depart just slightly more hastily from the snake house, as I came to know it as, than we did in real life, and back out into the sunshine, and over to the petting zoo.
The petting zoo held a shed-load of goats and llamas, prancing about willing to be petted, turkeys, who were not, and very cute little potbelly pigs, who were willing to be petted, but, we were warned by a fellow zoo-goer, rewarded petting them with a sharp bite on the hand. This part of the zoo was also a huge hit with the two year old in our party. The massive volumes of hay dust and goat... umm, dust, wafting out of the barn didn't phase him in the least, and, when I hit the showers the next day and a baby goat fell out of my hair, well, that's just a perfect end to a day at the zoo for a toddler.
disclaimer:
The official Sane Magazine Zoo Rating(tm) for Southwick's Zoo is:
Nineteen Golden Giraffes. And a boll weevil.
As we said last week, perhaps a bit prematurely. So. There you go. And here we go. See you next week, reporting from sunny Ireland.
SPONSOR MESSAGES:
Support Sane:
Tshirts & clothing: The Sane Magazine Shop at Cafe Press
- New designs trickling in now.
A Book: Fenway Fiction
A Second Book: Further Fenway Fiction
For you writerly types: Download Writer.app (which is free, so it's not really supporting us in a monetary, sugar daddy or mommy sort of way, but more in a "hey you guys go!" sort of way)
Or, visit our store at Amazon... check out some of the books that inspire or otherwise provoke the Sane Magazine writers.
Discuss this in the forums
Discuss the horoscopes in the forums
Forum hosting provided by forumthing.