You’re running a zoo. But visitors are clamoring for something different, more exotic.
You aren’t lucky enough to possess Moo Deng, the popular pygmy hippo from Thailand. In fact, you haven’t been able to get a hold of anything impressive or cute or charming enough to impress the masses on TikTok. What to do?
Have you considered simply disguising a prosaic animal as something more exciting?
Before you dismiss the idea as something from a bad ’80s comedy or a stoned late-night rap session, consider that it’s been done. Quite a few times.
Dogs do double duty.
Social media was awash last spring with images of chow chow dogs at Taizhou Zoo in Jiangsu Province, China, who were dyed black and white to look like pandas, the animal that is probably the world’s biggest zoo attraction.
Zoo officials shrugged off criticism at the time, with one telling The Qilu Evening News, via NBC that the subterfuge was akin to people dyeing their hair. More recently, visitors noticed signs fessing up and calling the so-called pandas “painted dogs.”
Taizhou Zoo was not the first place to come up with the idea. Owners of a traveling circus in Italy were charged in 2014 with disguising, yes, chow chows as pandas who posed for pictures with customers before the show. The circus was shut down.
But dogs can play more than just pandas. In Louhe, China, in 2013, a Tibetan mastiff was passed off as a lion. And at the same zoo, a dog was imitating a wolf and a fox was imitating a leopard, reported Beijing Youth Daily, via NPR.
Is that even alive?
Don’t have an animal to pass off as another? Here’s an even simpler plan. In 1984, the Houston Zoo admitted displaying a rubber snake in the reptile house. “We have had live snakes in the exhibit, but they don’t do well; they tend to die,” John Donaho, a curator, told The Associated Press. “Rather than kill snakes, we put out a rubber one for people to be able to see what they look like.”
A butterfly exhibit at a zoo in Guangxi Zhuang, China, in 2017, turned out to be an exhibit of plastic butterflies on sticks.
Telford Exotic Zoo in England blamed a penguin shortage caused by avian malaria for its display of plastic penguins in 2018.
Wait, are unicorns real?
Ringling Brothers Circus seemed to have pulled off a coup in the 1980s when it advertised real unicorns at its shows.
Ringling insisted the unicorns had just shown up at the circus one day, but it turned out the creatures were really goats whose horns had been fused together by a surgical procedure after birth.
Ringling stopped performances in 2017 but relaunched in 2023 without animals.
That’s got to be a guy in a suit!
That sun bear in Hangzhou, China, sure seemed humanlike: standing upright and peering out of its enclosure. And didn’t its fur in the back look almost folded? Like in a cheap costume? Hmmm.
A video of the bear took off on social media in the summer of 2023, and soon you couldn’t go online without seeing chatter on the idea that the sun bear was really just some guy in a bear suit.
The speculation became so widespread that the zoo released a statement clarifying that the sun bear was, in fact, a sun bear.
But the idea of humans disguised as animals has been floated, at least in fiction. In the 2020 South Korean comedy film “Secret Zoo,” keepers dress up as animals to revive a failing zoo.
Animal disguises, without human intervention.
Less interested in profit, and more in staying alive, some animals disguise themselves as other animals on their own.
Some spiders mimic ants to allow themselves to seem unthreatening as they sneak up on their prey. And some turtles use their tongues to imitate worms and lure hungry fish.
But the master is probably the mimic octopus. By contorting its body it can appear to be a sea snake, a jellyfish or an intimidating lionfish, among others.
A dog disguised as a panda suddenly doesn’t seem quite as odd.
The post Is That a Panda? Or a Dog in Disguise? appeared first on New York Times.
