I was feeling glum the other day, so I decided to visit the zoo. The zoo is a good place to visit when you’re down, because it puts things into perspective.
Sure, you may owe that bookie everything you own, but at least you’re not an ape trapped behind some plexiglass.
Sometimes you bring a mirror to the zoo and show a tiger its own reflection. And the tiger freaks out because it doesn’t understand the mirror and thinks its reflection is a rival tiger.
So yeah, maybe you weren’t smart enough to know that voodoo isn’t real. And you wasted all that money hiring a witch doctor to scare your bookie away. But at least you’re smart enough to understand reflections.
But then you think about it and you aren’t really sure how mirrors work at all. It probably has something to do with alternate dimensions.
The zoo really is a beautiful place. For the most part at least. Some zoos have gross parts, like a rat exhibit. I think if an animal at the zoo is ugly, you should be allowed to hunt it.
One thing about zoos is that they can be expensive. You have to pay for a ticket, you have to pay for lunch, and you have to pay all those fines for jumping the fence and trying to put cowboy hats on the giraffes.
But if you own the zoo, it’s big money. Once you’ve got all those animals locked up, they do all the work for you. You just sit back and watch your bank account grow. And that’s why I decided to start my own zoo.
If you want to start a zoo, the first thing you’ll have to do is answer the question that plagues all zookeepers. Do you let people wrestle the animals?
On one hand, there will be a lot of lawsuits and the animal activists will hate you. But on the other hand, you can start a betting pool on the wrestling matches and the anti-animal crowd will love you. We call this the Zookeeper’s Dilemma.
You’ll also have to trap a bunch of animals. You can catch small animals in a box propped up with a stick. But for bigger animals it’s trickier. Because there aren’t many boxes that can fit a bear. You’ll end up buying a lot of refrigerators and jet skis to get the right-sized boxes.
People like to see endangered animals, so I figured I’d start there. But it turns out there are a lot of regulations around capturing a panda. And even if you manage to snag one, it’s so big you have to buy it a first class ticket to get it back to your zoo.
Most zoos will keep experts on payroll to tell guests facts about the animals. But I think that’s a waste of money. I’ve found that if you make up facts while wearing safari clothes people will believe anything.
If you’re like me, you’re fed up with the fact that zoos are non-smoking. At my zoo, not only can you smoke, you can let the animals smoke one of your cigarettes too. But only if they ask for it.
Another thing zoos like to do is keep the animals in their own separate habitats. I say just throw them all together to save on space. Yeah, the llama might get annoyed and spit on the penguin, but most guests find that exciting.
You might think that zoos and casinos don’t mix. I say it’s fine as long as you don’t teach the apes how to gamble. Trust me, you don’t want to find yourself owing money to an orangutan.
Some zoos trade animals around to keep things fresh. But none of the zoos I talked to were willing to trade a rhinoceros for my ant farm.
I wouldn’t say my zoo is in its final form yet, but it’s definitely getting there. Some people complain that it’s less of a zoo and more the crawl space under my house. They say they were expecting to see lemurs and hippos, not crickets and mice. To that I say, there are also a few snakes down there if you crawl back far enough.
If a zoo seems too hard to set up, you might be tempted to do an aquarium instead. You’ll lose a lot of respect from people though, because everyone knows an aquarium keeper is just a zookeeper who couldn’t cut it.
