Daisy and the Trouble with Zoos (5 page)

At least zoo lions do. You can watch monkeys for ages because they never stop swinging around or climbing on tyres or scratching their bottoms. But lions don't have any ropes or tyres to play with. All they have is about two rocks.

They always look really puffed
out though. Except you can never tell why. Telly lions are always racing after zebras and stuff, which would definitely puff you out because zebras are really fast runners. But zoo lions never seem to do anything. Apart from twitch their tails. If you ask me, all zoo lions seem to do is lie down all the time and blink a lot.

And they've got flies on their face. Me and Gabby counted thirteen flies on one daddy lion's face.

Actually, I counted fifteen, but Gabby said I'd counted some of my flies twice.

The
trouble with counting flies on lions' faces
is the flies never stay still.

Only the lion does. One moment the flies are crawling around its eyes, the next minute they're crawling up its nose.

Gabby says lions' faces are covered in meat juice. The
trouble with meat juice
is if you don't wash it off, you get flies all over you.

Because meat juice is really attractive to flies. If lions washed their faces and paws after they'd had their zebra, they'd be all right. Trouble is, lions don't know how to use a flannel or pick up soap.

Dylan said that chameleons eat flies; so do tree frogs and so do little iguanas. So we went to the reptile house next.

The
trouble with reptile houses
is it's really dark inside.

Gabby said it was spooky, and my mum said she couldn't see where she was going. Then Dylan said we weren't inside the reptile bit yet. We were just in the bit you have to go through first.

When we opened the next door, it got bright again, and you could see lots of different tanks made of glass. That's what reptiles live in – glass tanks instead of cages, otherwise they'll crawl through the bars and get you.

There were all sorts of different lizards in the glass tanks, and snakes and even great big frogs. They didn't do very much either, though. In fact, the snakes looked even stiller than the lions.

Gabby said it was probably because it was so hot inside. She said if she lived somewhere that was as
hot as a reptile house, all she would do is lie down and eat ice creams.

Dylan said snakes don't eat ice creams and they were probably saving their energy for when they had to pounce on a locust or something else they wanted to eat. Locusts are like big grasshoppers, except they taste of Africa.

The
trouble with tasting of Africa
is that there are loads of animals that want to eat you: lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs. But not tortoises.

Tortoises only eat lettuce, which doesn't taste of anything. I know because I had some at my nanny and grampy's once.

The tortoises in the reptile house were being too still as well, so I tapped on their glass with my hand.

“Don't tap on the glass, Daisy,” said Mum, pointing to a sign on the glass tank that said, PLEASE DO NOT TAP ON THE GLASS.

The
trouble with not tapping on the glass in the reptile house
is you'll never get anything to move.

My mum said that every time we turned round the tortoises quickly jumped up and did cartwheels behind our backs.

But each time we turned round really quickly to try and catch them out, they still looked just as still. So we went to look at some other animals.

The
trouble with sparrows
is it's a swizz putting them in a zoo.

When we went to look at the spider monkeys, there were sparrows in the cage too! They were flying around and perching on branches and pecking at the floor and everything. Who wants to see sparrows in a zoo? You can see them
in your own garden at home.

If you ask me, zoos should let all their sparrows go and put something better in the cages instead. Like budgies!

Gabby said they might be African sparrows. But they looked like normal ones to me.

The
trouble with spider monkeys
is their heads look too small.