Yes, yes, disgraceful, disgraceful, disappointed children, outraged visitors and all that, but there is something vaguely endearing about what appears to be a case of attempted trickery on this heroic, utterly incompetent, scale:
A China zoo has been forced to apologise after it tried to pass off a dog as a lion. Angry visitors to the People’s Park in Luohe, Henan province, complained when the ‘African lion’ started barking. Zoo staff said they had pretended the Tibetan mastiff was a lion because they could not afford the real thing, local media reported. The state-run Beijing Youth Daily claims the zoo commonly replaced exotic animals with common species.
Elsewhere in the zoo, visitors found a mongrel dog in the Timber wolf’s cage and another pooch posing as a leopard in the big cat enclosure. Then in the reptile house, keepers had placed two giant sea cucumbers which they were trying to pass off as snakes….
One user of China’s Twitter-like Sina Welbo service commented: ‘They should at least use a husky to pretend to be a wolf.’
Slackers.