Daisy and the Trouble with Zoos (7 page)

Mum said they weren't signs, they were plaques, and each plaque meant that someone had adopted a sea lion. She said that zoos liked visitors to adopt their animals because it helped the zoo to look after them.

Loads of people had adopted the sea lions. I reckon it's because they've got really cute faces.
And they're really good swimmers. Mum said that sea lions have special nostrils that close tightly when they put their whiskers under the water. Sea-lion nostrils are so good they can stay under water for forty minutes! So can the rest of the sea lion!!

I tried holding my breath underwater in the bath once, but I could only do it for about one second. Plus the water went up my nose. That's because I haven't got sea-lion nostrils. Or a snorkel.

The
trouble with snorkels
is my mum won't let me have one.

Or a deep-sea diving suit. I saw a deep-sea diver on the telly once and it was really good.

If you've got a deep-sea diving suit, you get to do lots of roly-polys backwards off of boats. And you get to swim with actual sharks.

The
trouble with actual sharks
is they'd be better if they only had sucking teeth.

If sharks had sucking teeth like a humming bird instead of biting teeth
like a lion, then they wouldn't look so scary. Plus they wouldn't be able to chomp you, they'd only be able to suck you.

Whales only suck, and they don't look scary at all. Even great big whales don't look scary. They always look gentle and kind.

The
trouble with trying to fit a whale in a zoo
is there wouldn't be any space for any other animals.

Apart from leaf-cutter ants. That's why you never see whales in zoos.

About the biggest thing you can fit in a zoo is an elephant. Then it's a rhinoceros.

The
trouble with rhinoceroses
is they should go to the loo before the zoo opens.

Gabby, Dylan and me were looking down over the wall into the great big space where they
lived, when the rhino did the most ginormous disgusting wee! It was so ginormous and so disgusting that we had to close our eyes.

We closed our eyes and counted to ten, but when we opened them again, it was still doing it!

Dylan reckoned it did enough wee to fill two paddling pools! I reckon rhinos should be banned if they're going to do things like that in front of children on their birthday.

Mum said that when you're a rhino, you can just do what you want when you want. Because no one's going to stop you.

The
trouble with trying to stop a rhino
is they're made out of concrete.

If you try and stop a rhino doing a wee or anything, it will run you over and squash you flat or bash you up into the air with its horn.

Dylan said a rhino's horn isn't made out of concrete, it's made out of hair. Special hairy concrete-type hair that you only get in Africa.

Anyway, even if a rhino horn really is only made out of hair, it can still give you a really hard bash.

The other
trouble with white rhinos
is they're not that white.

The sign said it was a “White Rhino”, but the one at our zoo was brown.

Gabby said it wasn't brown, it was mud, and it was probably white underneath the brown mud. I said it should stop getting so muddy or everyone would think it was a liar, but Dylan said it needed the mud for camouflage.

The
trouble with camouflage
is it makes things really hard to see.

Apart from the Nile monitor lizard. I saw him straight away.

Camouflage is like wearing special clothes that make you invisible. Lizards' camouflage is the colour of leaves, butterflies' camouflage is the colour of flower petals, zebras' camouflage is the colour of stripy grass and the Loch Ness monster's camouflage is the colour of Loch Ness.

That's why no one's ever seen it. Including deep-sea divers.

The worst kind of zoo camouflage is the flamingos. They're easy peasy to see, because flamingos aren't the
same colour as anything. They're just pink. Bright pink, too! And they stand on one leg.

The
trouble with standing on one leg when you're pink
is it makes you look like a stick of candyfloss.

Dylan says if animals don't taste nice, sometimes they have really bright colours on them to warn other animals not to bite them.