Animals: Don’t Feed the Animals

Last week some 250,000 Manhattanites visited their newly renovated Central Park Zoo, purchased more than 10,000 bags of colored popcorn. Aware of the popcorn’s destination, alarmed zoo officials posted bright new signs which read: DO NOT FEED OR ANNOY THE ANIMALS. $25 FINE. The “$25” was a bluff, since New York magistrates fix their own fines, usually assess persistent animal-feeders only $3. But zoomen felt their lie was white in view of such zoological mishaps as the following, all caused in recent years by visitors catering to bestial appetites:

¶ In Washington Zoo, six Angora goats and a monkey died of eating laurel leaves and seeds.

¶ In San Francisco’s Fleishhacker Zoo, an ostrich swallowed an orange stuffed with razor blades and safety pins, died. A 150-lb. Galapagos turtle died after being fed a 2-in. rubber band filled with carpet tacks.

¶ In New York City’s Bronx Zoo, a rare Himalayan bear ate a peach. The pit stuck in his small intestine, killed him. A hippopotamus gulped a tube of toothpaste, grew violently ill. In the stomach of a cassowary dead of indigestion were found a golf ball, a metal doll, twelve pop bottle tops, a vanity case top.

Last week the Bronx Zoo’s director William Reid Blair generously observed: “Persons who feed such things to animals are merely curious, not malicious. They are unable to understand that an animal’s digestive system does not necessarily grow more rugged as its size increases.”