A Trip to the Zoo, err Tier...

One of the Tierpark's major attractions is its porcupine pit. This might sound a bit whacky, but the porcupines are the first really exotic animal on the main path from the entrance, unless you count goats and some kind of buffalo as exotic. A few years back one of them (the porcupines) suddenly gave birth. This is quite normal for zoo animals, in fact any kind of animal really, except the Tierpark didn't know they had a male porcupine. This came as quite a surprise, particularly for the female porcupines, but it turns out baby porcupines are remarkably cute and only a little bit spiny and were quite a hit until they grew up and disappeared onto the international porcupine black market. The Tierpark still isn't quite sure which one is the daddy porcupine, due to certain logistical problems when it comes to establishing porcupine gender, and apparently developments in porcupine obstetrics have not been all they could be (there's a niche for any budding vetinarians among you), so any future offspring are likely to be equally unexpected.


The Tierpark also has a few elephants and things. In fact they have four little baby elephants right now, although that wasn't quite such a surprise as the porcupines because they have several known male elephants. If you are not an expert at elephant gender recognition, you can tell by the curve of the male elephant's horns, and also by the fact that he seems to have a second trunk dangling away down at the back. This is a family blog so I won't go into details, but I bet male elephants just laugh derisively whenever they receive "enlargement" email spam.


In the elephant house (actually it's the pachyderm house but only pedants call it that) there's also a big pool full of green gloopy water inhabited by manatees and vast amounts of salad, which appears to be their primary source of sustenance. Manatees, if you haven't made their acquaintance, are huge but docile creatures, which is a good thing because the glass viewing wall at one end of the pool looks very Made in GDR and while I've no doubt their manatee tank construction engineers worked to higher standards than say their car producers, the prospect of being inundated by streams of manatee do-do infested water is somewhat less than attractive. No wonder the rhinocerous opposite was looking so depressed.


Nearby is the Big Cats House. You can tell by the huge tins of Kitekat piled up outside. Actually I was fibbing there. The big cats are encouraged to acquire their food in the same way as they do in the wild, to keep their wits sharp and prevent them from going stir crazy. The zookeepers accomplish this by pressing a special button which opens a little door in the respective cages whenever a particularly raucous group of children passes by. If this was true it would be one explanation for Germany's demographic problem, but again I was fibbing, and actually the keepers keep their pussies satisifed with raw rodents and stuff.


Which leads to an interesting question: where do the buckets of dead mousies consumed each day come from? We headed off to the children's zoo, which can be located aurally from up to five miles away by the sound of half-crazed sheep chasing after hyperactive, screaming children. There was a big cage of degus, which resemble gerbils on anabolic steroids, and which currently appear to be engaged in some kind of research project involving establishing who can sleep in the most impossible position. Nearby were some guinea pigs, actually quite a lot of guinea pigs, whom the keepers had thoughtfully shut out of their little houses for the day, and here's an interesting thing: the fence around the guinea pig's enclosure was about as high as a guinea pig is long. It was almost as if the Tierpark is running a sort of guinea pig pick-your-own, and judging by the number of guinea pig kiddies running about there seems to be no danger of them becoming an endangered species should one submit to temptation and slip one discretely into a pocket. Also, the Tierpark has demonstrated what to do if you ever find yourself needing to create a guinea pig-sized hay manger: just recycle an old magazine rack.


With that it started raining (tip: modify your guinea pig's magazine rack manger with some kind of roof to keep the straw dry) and we beat a hasty retreat towards the much less exciting city center.