Daisy and the Trouble with Zoos (6 page)

Plus their tails look too long. Mum said that spider monkeys can
use their tails just like people use their arms and legs. Their tails are really strong, which means they can hang upside down from branches and peel kiwi fruits at the same time.

I still can't see why they've got such small heads though …

Gabby said they probably fell from a tree when they were hanging by their tails. If you fall from a tree when you're hanging by your tail, your head will hit the ground and get banged down into your shoulders. That would definitely make your head look really small.

Dylan said they were just weird.

Not as weird as a fossa though. Me, Gabby and Dylan had never heard of a fossa before. Even my mum hadn't heard of a fossa, and she's heard of everything! But fossas do exist because we nearly actually saw one. And boy, do they look weird!

They've got the whiskers of an otter, the nose of a dog, the tail of a cat and the smooth brown body of an ottercatdog!! How weird is that?

The
trouble with fossas
is they hide a lot, which means that if you look through the glass, you don't actually get to see an actual fossa.

You can see the actual picture of them on the cage, though.

Mum said that fossas are like ugly tree lions, and they can chase
through trees just like a squirrel. Except they don't chase nuts. They chase lemurs!

To eat!

Gabby reckons fossas eat cars, too, because there were two dead tyres on the floor of the fossa's cage. All the rest of the car had been eaten! Dylan said there was no way that any animal could eat a car. Except for a tyrannosaurus rex. But me and Gabby definitely reckoned the fossa tyres had been chewed.

Then we looked for bits of dead lemur. But we couldn't see any. So we went to look at the alive ones.

The
trouble with alive lemurs
is they look like spider monkeys.

Plus they haven't got any thumbs. Not proper thumbs like proper humans anyway. Mum said that they'd be no good at hitchhiking. But we didn't know what she meant. Then she said that considering they didn't have proper thumbs, they were really good at peeling oranges.

There were dead bits of actual fruit all over the lemurs' floor.

The
trouble with dead bits of actual fruit
is they make the cage look really untidy.

Mum said the floor of the lemur cage reminded her of the floor in my bedroom. Which is a lie, because the only fruit I've ever left on my carpet is about three apple cores.

And a banana skin.

But not a mouldy one. And not all at the same time either. Like a lemur would.

Plus I don't like kiwi fruit. It's got too many pips.

The
trouble with pips
is they don't taste very nice.

If you had lemur teeth, they'd probably taste all right, but if you've got normal teeth, then they don't taste very nice at all. Especially if you crunch one.

My mum bought a big bunch of grapes from the supermarket once and they were full of pips. In fact, there
were more pips than grape! She said she'd meant to buy pipless grapes, but the supermarket was closing so she'd just grabbed the nearest ones.

The
trouble with just grabbing the nearest ones
is you can end up spitting pips out for ages.

Mum only buys pipless grapes now. But mostly she buys apples.

Or bananas. And tangerines at Christmas. But not kiwis.

Because of the pips.

Chapter 8

After the lemurs we went to see the llamas.

The
trouble with llamas
is they might spit at you even if they're not eating grapes!

My mum says llamas only spit at people when they're frightened, and the thing to do is watch their ears. If the ears of a llama go back, then it
means they're going to spit and you should run away as fast as you can.

Gabby reckons llamas only spit at people who call them names. They'd probably spit at Jack Beechwhistle then, 'cos he's always calling people names.

I bet if he saw a llama, he'd call it Goofy or something, just because its teeth stick out and look all funny. Jack Beechwhistle called Melanie Beamish “Bugs Bunny” once at school, and her teeth hardly stick out at all. She didn't spit at him, though. We're not allowed to do spits at school. She whacked him on the back with her
lunch box instead.

Dylan says animal teeth have different designs, depending on what sort of food they eat. Lions have biting teeth, hyenas have crunching teeth, giraffes have munching teeth and humming birds have sucking teeth. Which you can't actually see because they're so small.

Elephants have the biggest teeth. Did you know an elephant's tooth is the size of a brick and weighs three kilos! That's heavier than a flower pot! It's definitely true because it said so on the sign on the wall outside the elephant cage.

Imagine being a tooth fairy and having to pick up an elephant's tooth! Gabby reckons it would take about twenty tooth fairies all at once to pick up an elephant's tooth. I reckon tooth fairies have special fairy cranes for doing really heavy zoo jobs.

There were loads of signs on the walls at the zoo. At first I didn't take much notice of them because the animals were too exciting, but when we went to see the sea lions, the whole wall was covered in signs!