One of the biggest perks of being Ypsilanti’s Democratic candidate for City Council in Ward 3 is that doors that were once locked to me are now wide open.I probably shouldn’t publish this, but for the sake of transparency, here goes.

On Saturday, I was given a behind-the-scenes tour of the Toledo Zoo and fed dead mice to crocodiles. I know what you’re thinking. How are the Toledo Zoo and the City of Ypsilanti related? And what does local politics have to do with reptiles?

One word: REGIONALIZATION

We had the opportunity to chose which animals we wanted to feed. I didn’t want to be part of anything too gruesome. They did feed a dead calf to the tigers, but that was strictly a unique happening. We were told they were going to feed chicks to the artic foxes, but that’s not how I roll. We settled on feeding mice to the crocidiles. It seemed the most humane thing we could do. I also thought I might get the opportunity to wrestle one Steve Irwin-style as a loving tribute.

They took us behind all of the cages belonging to the poisonous snakes. They told us about fifteen times not to touch anything. Getting bitten by a snake at the Toledo Zoo is a pretty regular occurrence. The zookeeper giving us the tour was just bitten a few days prior to us being there. It sounds like a rather dangerous career, but the potential for fabulous pranks definitely makes it worth the risk.

When we were finally taken to the prep area, our zookeeper needed to inflate the mice. You see, if you throw a dead mouse in a pool with a crocodile, they will just sink. Unlike stingrays, crocodiles have very bad eyesight so they need the extra time to find the mice and making them float is the only way to do that. I should say that the entire time the mice were being inflated, I was standing next to a box filled with dead rabbits meant for the pythons. My dream of making this as humane as possible took a hit at that point.

Feeding the crocs was pretty fun. They gave us each a rubber glove so we didn’t have to touch the dead mice. I made the mistake of scratching my neck with my glove hand and have been feeling under the weather for the past week. The crocs were hungry too. They were snapping and splashing all over the place. It was an incredible sight. The best thing was learning that if you flip a crocodile on it’s back when wrestling it, you cause its blood pressure to drop and they subsequently pass out. I fully intend to test this theory out, but not before I do some more training.

I would encourage everyone to run for office so that you may one day have the opportunity to feed crocodiles. It’s definitely worth being trashed throughout your neighborhood for a couple of months.

You can find a tiny slideshow, HERE.

No Comments »

No comments yet.

Deprecated: Function comments_rss_link is deprecated since version 2.5.0! Use post_comments_feed_link() instead. in /home/b5ztzahnguoa/public_html/east-cross.com/wp-includes/functions.php on line 5413
RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment