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Hi Pep,

sure youre wright when you say its not educational to have brackfast with an ape or tiger.
And deffenatly sure when you say a macaw riding a bike is not educational as i have never ever seen a parrot ride a bike in the wild.
And lets not talk of the animal entertainment ive seen in Asia which is even worse.
It also concerns me when i see these type of entertainment still in large zoological institutions like loroparque and mundomar.
This was common during the ages of the menageries in the big cities (London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, Boedapest, and so on)but surely unwanted in 2006.

But we musn't forget that if we have opportunities to get people interacted with animals we can educate and we schould educate

For example, our llamas are trained to walk with visitors trough our local villages and forrests.
The llamas are carrying their packages and picknickbaskets.





This is an highly interactive educational part as llamas become very popular as pets, but no 
one knows how to take care of them(even many zoos don't know!!!)
During the walk we explain all there is to know about llamas and alpaca's.For example many of us don't know that llamawool can heat up to nearly 100 degrees in summertime and that it can burn their skin,(especially dark colloured animals) their for its important to have a waterhole, some shadyplaces for them to liedown in and to shave their "saddle" every year!!!( leave one cm of wool so they don't get a skinburn from the sun!)

We organise parrot encounters with our freeflight birds and educate people by telling them that parrots don't make good pets, for those whom allready have a parrot pet we give workshop in understanding their petbird (natural behaviours, body language, foodsupplies and so on)with cooperation of IAATE and the World Parrot Trust.
We especially ask people not to "buy or win"a parrot at the carnival or townfairs and we expain why people schouldn't set wild animal free in our countries where they don't belong.

At every freeflight presentation we say to the children in our audience that many of our birds can't be pettet because their wild, but we promise them by the end of the show that they get birds which they can pet, hug, feed and yes even take home, because we know they will return them before they left the park.
At the end of a show we say good bye to our audience and pretent to have forgotten the children, which will surely let us know we are forgetting something!
We then call all kids to come up and sit at front of the stage and we ask them whom goes eat at Mc Donalds, well nearly all of them does so no problem.
Then we ask them if they know whats a chicken.
After that we ask them if the know how big a chicken can get and we call out Hugo our rooster which is a Brahma breed the world largestchickenbreed, and they all are stunned when they see him.
Hugo is nearly 9 kg!!!
Then we tell them they can pet him and feed him.
Well next problem is that we  have 1 rooster and nearly every show about a minimum of 20 children which want to hold him, hug him and feed him.
so we call out some help for Hugo which is our group of 30 Indian runnerducks, some with hoods.
And all kids start laughing and screaming as they see the ducks storm towards the kids for food.

For the same reason we use domesticated animals in our educational presentations, potbelliedpigs, pigs, donkeys, dogs and cats, geese, Indian runnerducks, chickens, turkeys, peacocks, pigions, budgigars, tame rats, ferrets.
These animals all make good trainable animals with an high educational value!

Next year we will start training our New Guinea Singing dogs to go on stage with a labrador retriever, and this way we can tell something about the origin of domestic dogs.

(??? yes the New Guinea singing dog is the origin of our petdogs and not the wolf, wolfs made out a great deal to create some breeds like german scheaperds!!!)

We also have especially for smaller kids up to age 12, a programm called critters and creapers, which include many food animals such as crickets, grasshoppers,mealworms, mice and rats, but also birdeatingspiders, millypeats, cockraoches, snails, gianttoads, and a snake.

this is a very interesting programm which we do every wednesday at 15:00 as children are free from school, parrents even find this very interesting and it gets even so far that if a child had a spidder on its hands mom needs to hold it as well!!!

We even do a insect bar where kids and parrents can taste backed crickets and mealworms, this is one of our main attractions during the dreamnight at the zoo evening!!!

So this are some of our educational programms, please feel free to post it on the forum.
One of our services is that we visit zoos and animalparks on a consultbase to see the posibilities of education in their park.
We also set up programms and train staff to do a presentation or keepertalk.
There are so much possibilities zoos don't even know about or see.
If you like to contact me, feel free to do so.

With kind regards,

Mariano Zamorano
Senior trainer and Director of ZOONIMAL
contact person for "Dreamnight at the Zoo"
mariano at zoonimal.com
www.zoonimal.com
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