From ITV.com:
It's a grim time in the fun business. In Southend-on-Sea, the owner of Sealife says he may have to euthanise animals in his "zooquarium" because the annual cost of electricity has tripled from £240,000 to three quarters of a million pounds.
Philip Miller says keeping animals including monkeys, meerkats and tropical fish through the winter would be too costly, if the attraction was closed to save money.
"All these animals have to keep warm - or cold - or a combination of both*, and it's on 24/7, seven days a week. And they have to be fed, so it's a massive bill to maintain. They'll all have to euthanised or we find other homes but all the other zoos are going to be in the same boat, I'd imagine," Mr Miller said.
* I'm not sure what a "combination of being kept warm and cold" is in practice, but I hope he can sort something out.
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4 comments:
"monkeys, meerkats and tropical fish"
I'd never realised that monkeys and meerkats were marine animals.
B, it's a 'zooquarium'. Monkeys and meerkats - like all animals - can swim. How exciting watching sharks chase the poor little buggers across the tanks!
“I’d never realised that monkeys and meerkats were marine animals.”
Oddly enough, ‘meerkat’ translates into English as ‘sea-cat’*, while the Germans use almost exactly the same word - Meerkatze - for vervet monkeys (this apparently because they arrived in Europe by ship and were thought to resemble cats (not sure exactly how...); Dutch settlers in South Africa, showing a similar disregard for taxonomy, subsequently applied the term to the little clicky chaps we all know and love).
Since the Germans use Meerkatze to refer to monkeys, they needed a different term for meerkats and, rather charmingly, came up with ‘Erdmännchen’ - ‘little earth people’, which never fails to make me smile.
*To add to the confusion, Wiktionary renders this in English as ‘mercat’, a reminder of my great disappointment as a child that Glasgow’s Mercat Building was home to market transactions rather than a host of aquatic felines.
McH, thanks, I'd wondered why Meerkatze doesn't mean meercat. Erdmännchen still sounds weird to me, they are clearly not. Look more like suqirrels with thin rails.
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