It is hard to appreciate how big elephant seals really are until you see them next to someone like this. Apparently my local zoo, the LA Zoo, also had elephant seals in the era this picture was taken. I wonder why they are a species that is no longer kept in zoos given their size and charisma?
Nice pic, makes me thinking about "good old times" with elephant seals in nearly every bigger zoo in germany... Saw them in Duisburg and Berlin Zoo and it seems to me as both in Flamingo Land were smaller than Duisburg´s male "Moritz", this animal seemed to be a giant for me...
If you were on the lucky side, you had a chance to meet him on the ways round his pool, because he escaped from his enclosure really often !
That's funny as a few years after this photo was taken by which time only Gog was at Flamingo Park (as far as I know Magog went to Cleethorpes as the IZYB used to list a specimen there), I was walking by the side of the Flamingo Lake with my parents one winter's day when we saw Gog in the lake crashing through the ice pursuing the waterfowl (maybe the zoo's own, wild hangers-on, or a mixture - the Flamingos would have been locked away for the winter, they were often in the small Elephant House with the Elephant having gone to the winter zoo at Leeds). We just presumed he was meant to be there. Years later I was talking to Neville Wilby, who was by then the semi-retired Zoological Consultant, and recalled this incident. Mr Wilby said this was not the case at all and that Gog was for ever escaping and heading for the Flamingo Lake. It must run in the species.
