Christine has been collecting articles about travel and day trips from Sunset magazine, and on Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, we decided to take a country drive along the 118 highway, as suggested by this
article. Our first stop was at
America's Teaching Zoo, a learning facility for students in Moorpark College's Exotic Animal Training and Management (EATM) program. I chuckled a bit when I saw that the acronym for the program spelled "eat 'em," but these students took their work very seriously.
The first thing that we saw was an animal show. Having been to the Animal Planet show at Universal Studios, I was pretty excited for some cool animal tricks, especially when I saw ramps, doors, platforms and other stuff that looked perfect for animals to show us their stuff. As it turned out, this show had only a few animals, and was a bit rough around the edges. Jonathan was interested to varying degrees, and was definitely happy to be out of the stroller. The theme of the show was animal defenses.
One of the more disgusting animal guests was the Madagascar Hissing Cockroach, which makes a hissing noise (in large groups) to scare off predators. The trainers let the big bugs crawl all over their arms and legs.
Jonathan decided to go in for a closer look at the macaw and a couple of other creatures, including a zebu. The little rockery in front of him was part of a shallow moat that separated the stage from the audience. Jonathan was studying it, and we were waiting for him to jump over and become a part of the show. No worries, though; there were no big cats or other dangerous critters in the show.
Daddy's favorite part of the zoo was the carnivore exhibit. We happened to arrive just in time to catch the last animal show of the day and then to see the feeding of the carnivores. This beautiful girl was an abnormally large lion. Though it looks like we could walk right up to the cages, there was a chain link fence about six feet away from the animal enclosures.
What a beauty! I got a laugh earlier, when a group of kids were standing at the chain link fence in front of her and were taunting her with roars and loud voices. In a flash, she let out a short bark and snapped at the bars of her enclosure. The kids jumped back, and got quiet. I think they got the point.
As we were watching the carnivore feeding, Jonathan was content to walk 20-50 yards away and play with sticks and rocks.
All animals did tricks as part of their feeding. The trainers told us that this hyena was the smartest carnivore at the zoo. The hyena could do 30 or more tricks. We were surprised at how large the hyena was. On nature shows, when we see hyenas in the wild, they appear to be the size of dogs. Not so. This thing was huge.
The hyena enjoyed some scratching and rest after her meal. The trainers told us that, while they don't ever contact the animals without cages between them, they do come and lie down next to the animals (on the other side of the enclosure) and take naps with them.
We saw all kinds of monkeys, orangutans, lemurs, and other primates, too. Apparently, this one was a male. Ah-hem.
Eventually Jonathan's short nap caught up with him, and he ended up back in the stroller. He liked the primates.
We said goodbye to the contented carnivores on our way out.
Mr. Sleepy looked like he was envying the hammocks in the primates' enclosures.
Overall, we had a great experience at the teaching zoo, and we only needed a couple of hours to see the whole thing. That was good, because we had more stops to make on our country drive. Stay tuned for Christine's update about our stop at Underwood Family Farms.
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