Telford Exotic Zoo has a brand new visitor attraction: a £60,000 penguin enclosure. Unfortunately there is a bit of a penguin shortage, thanks to a national outbreak of avian malaria, so the penguins currently on show at the zoo are, um, plastic models.
Deception is not the intent, according to zoo owner Scott Adams; it is just so children can learn about penguins while they wait for some live ones to arrive. “It’s specially made for penguins and not really suitable for anything else, so we have no alternative,” he said.
That is an odd point to make: the enclosure is specially designed for real penguins, but any kind of fake animal would presumably thrive in it. He could put a stuffed giraffe in there if he wanted. The alternatives are limitless.
However, in the history of misleading zoo exhibits, Telford’s plastic penguins constitute a respectable effort. Last year, a newly opened zoo in Yulin, China, stocked its penguin enclosure with inflatable toys, some of which quickly deflated. The other exhibits consisted of geese, roosters and a single tortoise.
Four years earlier another Chinese zoo in Henan province was accused of passing off a dog as a lion. To be fair the animal – a Tibetan mastiff – did a pretty good lion impersonation. For a dog. Elsewhere in the zoo, visitors discovered another dog in the wolf enclosure and a fox standing in for a leopard.
In 2009, it was reported that a zoo in Gaza City had circumvented an Israeli ban on the importation of animals by painting two donkeys with zebra stripes, using black hair dye. This turned out to be a rather poignant story – the zoo’s real zebras had starved to death during an Israeli military offensive and could not be replaced – but as recently as last summer, a Cairo zoo was accused of striping its own donkey. Zoos across the world also routinely dress humans up as tigers, leopards and rhinos so that zookeepers can practice animal escape drills. Verisimilitude is generally not a priority – it usually looks as if they are trying to dart a rogue football mascot – but if you keep the public far back enough, it is all the same to them.
