Hungry Hungry Hippo

The last time I went to a zoo in India was a few years ago when I toured the cages of scurvy ridden animals in both New Delhi and Jaipur. Elsewhere in the world you take your children to zoos to show off the wonders of the animal kingdom and enrich their understanding of biodiversity and evolution. Indian zoos seem to have a slightly different purpose--they warn of the horrors of the Russian gulag and educate children on how fortunate they are to have been born humans. I once saw a brown bear in a cage barely larger than my dining room table--and a hyena with so many sores on it that it resembled the mage ridden mutts outside it's cage. But my opinion is beginning to change.

Yesterday afternoon my wife and I dropped by Anna Zoo 30 kilometers south of Chennai and we were shocked by how well maintained the facilities were and how much space the animals were given. There was a whole menagerie of happy looking critters, and since we're in the tropics, most of them were in the proper habitat (unlike the Elephant housed up in the zoo in Anchorage Alaska).

The highlight was a rather hungry pigmy hippo that wouldn't stop showing off his spectacular dental hygiene. I think he even posed deliberately for the camera on a few occasions. I'll tell you, you haven't lived until you've seen the inside of a hippo's maw.