Some people think they can get away with anything, and what should have been a nice morning excursion has just been ruined by a brazen insult to our intelligence: This zoo is trying to pass a bunch of sheep off like they’re rare enough for a separate exhibit.
C’mon, we weren’t born yesterday. Get the fuck out of here with this shit!
We were just coming off a fun stroll through the zoo’s reptile house and were trying to decide where to go next when we noticed a big sign pointing to our right that said “SHEEP: The Emperors Of The Hills.” Now at first, we figured this was a sign destined for the zoo’s Petting Barn attraction that an absentminded employee had simply set down and forgotten along the way. Surely if we head down this path we’ll find a bonafide zoo A-lister like gorillas or giraffes, we thought, trying to be charitable and assuming this all was just a silly mistake. But it turns out that level of respect is not something the zoo feels like showing us in return, because what we ended up finding was a standalone exhibit characterizing sheep as some kind of exotic marvel instead of the ubiquitous barnyard animal that anyone with half a brain can recognize as such.
Top to bottom, this sheep exhibit just oozes condescension toward the zoo’s paying customers. For one thing, describing the sheep as “emperors of the hills” implies a certain grandeur that these shit-smeared doofuses clearly don’t possess, as though they’re noble creatures from a far-off land and not just right there moseying on the side of the highway anytime you drive through even remotely rural areas. Also, the exhibit’s reading materials mention a dedicated “resident sheep biologist” in charge of replicating the sheeps’ habitat and diet, like those things are complex topics that require specialized knowledge and not just “a lot of fucking grass” and “a lot of fucking grass,” respectively. Perhaps most insultingly, these aren’t even a particularly rare kind of sheep. They’re the most basic, garden-variety sheep there are! There’s not even a specific breed or taxonomic delineation on the informational placards—they literally just say that they’re “sheep” with no specificity beyond that. But the zoo seems to think we’ll clap like trained seals for pretty much any four-legged animal they trot out in front of us, even if that animal is just domesticated livestock whose meat we could buy at a goddamn Costco.
These assholes aren’t fooling anybody!
The sheep enclosure’s elaborate construction and sizable acreage make it painfully obvious that this exhibit should have been some kind of showstopper like big cats or elephants, but the zoo just couldn’t line up a draw quite that eye-catching. Which is fair enough! We can appreciate that plans fall through sometimes, but they could have at least been honest about it instead of treating us like credulous rubes who believe sheep are the height of curiosity. We might as well just head for the parking lot now, because even cool, legitimately rare animals like the sugar gliders aren’t going to be able to pull us out of the funk we’re in knowing just how little the zoo really thinks of us.
Sheep? Really? What a fucking joke.
We really, really do not enjoy being treated like this. Here’s hoping the zoo gets their shit together and never tries to pull another stunt like this again!
