Talking about species which existence in a zoo are ambigous, another case that I took notice of is the
warthog at Taman Safari Bogor.
An stuffed warthog housed in a glass casing is present in one of sheltered resting platform in the Meerkat-Mandrill complex. It have no sign at all, but it can be easily spotted just behind the meerkats exhibits.
This specific complex has always kept meerkats and mandrills for a long time, so I didn't really found no place on where the warthogs would be located if they're truly been displayed at some point.
These are my theories from what I think to be likely to unlikely, but still possible. Though all of these couldn't explain the lack of signage:
- This is just a random stuffed animals that aren't related to the former park's collection at all. Worth noting that atleast in the early 2010's (Around 2011-2012), this complex is heavily marketed as a "Lion King" exhibit, with the meerkats and mandrills to represent the characters of Timon and Rafiki, respectively. Pumbaa the warthog is also a very popular character from the series and is associated with Timon the meerkat. Maybe they couldn't get a warthog to complete the roster for some reason and instead make up for that by adding and stuffed, possibly fake warthog instead.
- The warthog is one of the warthog or even the one warthog that was already acquired by the park when its alive, but passed away during the habituation period for some reason. Since warthog is probably quite a prized animal in zoos, the park doesn't simply threw away the warthogs and instead used them for other purposes, like for an stuffed collection.
- The warthog at some point was kept and displayed by the park in the past, died atleast somewhere in the 2000's or even earlier in the late 90's, and later put on display again as a stuffed animals. Not really much explanation aside from the fact that they do did the same thing with their former polar bears (Bjurn and Tasha) in the now Humboldt penguin exhibit.
