Misidentified Animals

Yesterday's trip to zoo Zlín was really... something, but I decided to mention just two things I've experienced:
I was waiting with my girlfriend at the entrance, it was 8:20 or so, so it was basically just us and some family with a little kid. The kid seemed bored and not capable of waiting for the zoo to open, so it's mother (or maybe a grandmother, I'm not sure) pointed at a picture of lion on one of the signs and asked "what's this animal?" As I was watching it, I whispered "tiger" just for fun, because big cats get misidentified all the time for some reason and I see this happening too often. The child went "vroom vroom". And the mother's response? "No, that's no vroom vroom, that's a tiger! A lion!" I could not help myself and facepalmed, because the situation was just too ridiculous.
Also, we've been to the jaguar exhibit three times and in at least two cases we've overheard people calling it a cougar? Which makes no sense in czech by the way, since the czech word for jaguar is "jaguár" and the cougar is called "puma". In one of the cases it was a child saying that, the second case was an adult. I don't want to know how many people actually have to say that every single day.
 
I spent a good amount of time in front of both the lemurs (ring-tailed, black-and-white-ruffed, and crowned) and binturongs at Zoo Atlanta last Friday. It was the busiest I'd ever seen the zoo (I unintentionally went on Good Friday), and the confident misidentifications just did not stop.

Well, first I'll note that an adult woman pointed out to the child that "that's the mommy and that's the daddy" in reference to two of the zoo's three male lions.

The lemurs got, in order:
  • skunk (black-and-white ruffed, obviously)
  • monkey
  • monkey
  • panda(also the black-and-white-ruffed but LOL)
  • "that one [ring-tailed lemur] is the lemur, not that one [one of the other two]"
  • koala (crowned)
Then the sun bears were pandas, and then the red panda was a panda (everything else about the day makes me assume that they called it that for no sound reason). For a zoo that I thought no longer had pandas, they sure do have a lot of pandas!

But then the binturongs just took the cake. We had:
  • koala
  • sloth
  • fox
  • beaver
  • bear
  • leopard
  • bear
  • monkey
  • tiger
  • raccoon
  • leopard
  • raccoon
That was over the span of about 30 minutes. Some of those are just so utterly inconceivable to me - how do you see a shaggy smallish black thing on a branch and go "yes, this matches how I understand tigers or beavers to look and behave"?. This isn't even the first time I've heard people call them leopards! I suspect that somehow some wires are getting crossed with the nearby clouded leopard exhibit (well, former clouded leopard exhibit as of yesterday ☹️), but it's not as if that exhibit has any signage that would be visible at a distance, so....??????
 
I had to jump into this. Happened back when I was probably 12. There is this one petting zoo, not even 5 minutes from my old home. They had ostriches at one point, and I guess you weren't supposed to feed them. (There were no signs or warnings indicating not to, like on some of their carnivores and omnivores.) I didn't know you couldn't, so I threw in a few pellets, and the owner and a keeper that was with her came around yelling, "Don't feed the EMU'S!" Afterwards, she was pretty nice about it, but I was so close to saying something since I couldn't understand how someone who owns a petting zoo, can't even tell the difference between an Emu and an Ostrich.
 
Maximoose said:
That is so sad did she die? I saw it a little over a month ago she seemed to be doing fine
Click to expand...
Unfortunately yes. It was also major whiplash for me considering I'd seen her just days beforehand and she seemed to be moving and behaving like I'd always seen from her.
 
What gets me the most is when people just flagrantly disregard signage. I was at Montgomery Zoo over the weekend and overheard a family debating whether the greater kudus were a type of deer or llama... while standing right in front of explicit signage that said exactly what you might expect, giving its name and something to the tune of "a large species of antelope" (on top of other information, it was solid signage).

I get not knowing something. I appreciate the difference between zoogoers wondering "is that some kind of X?" and confidently declaring "that's an X!", where X is not the thing they're looking at - the latter's a lot more frustrating to hear than the former. I get that the average person isn't going to know what a "greater kudu" is, and that most people couldn't tell you the difference between a deer and an antelope assuming neither had visible antlers or horns. But why would you have a lengthy back-and-forth about it when the answer is plainly right in front of you? This is rhetorical, of course, because I also get that the average guest just wants to come in and look at the big cats and elephants and gorillas and then go home and forget about anything else, no need to add new information to their head. But it's disappointing to see all the same.
 
@Kharzo and I went to Dvůr on Tuesday and oh god, I actually wish we did not go to the safari that day. Since I don't know of a better thread where to write this down, I decided to put it here.
We decided to take the safari truck, since we don't have a car and because the truck ride is longer than the bus ride. We both also enjoy the driver's commentary, we've always found those guys actually quite skilled. Well, until now.
We got on the truck and soon found out the driver is some old guy who's not very good at articulation. Then we realized that he has to be probably kind of senile and... not too knowledgeable.
It started with him calling the Nile lechwe "aboka". The czech name for Nile lechwe is "voduška abok", but he just went with calling them aboka. I decided to shrug it off, but not even a minute later he started talking about the marabou storks. But he said they were a kind of pelicans. He repeated it multiple times.
As our ride continued, things were getting worse and worse. He called the grey herons "little grey birds" multiple times. He also spoke about the wild mallards and geese living in the area. There were flocks of greylag geese at the pond. He pointed at them and said those were actually Egyptian geese, "the rarest kind of geese". Wow. Really.
He also said that drills are "little cute monkeys". That might sound like recession when written in english, but trust me it wasn't. And again - drills are called "dril" in czech, but he decided to call them "drila" for some weird reason.
When passing the African wild dogs, he started a strange monologue about them being the most beautiful dogs in the world and that you could probably buy them somewhere, but it would be expensive. And that they don't make good pets. Not because they were agressive or simply a wild species of canids. But because they're stubborn. And I don't think he called them "dogs" even once, he went with the word "doggies". Oh god.
Encouraging the visitors to pet and feed the giraffes at the safari was also something.
When passing the lions, he said that Dvůr has bred hundreds of them. And that they are being released into the African wild.
Oh, and if you didn't know, the Cape buffalo is the fourth most dangerous animal in the world! The only animals more dangerous than buffalos are tigers, lions and sharks.
 
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