Whew...it's been four and half, five hours since I left the Cat Tales Zoological Park, and I still don't have my thoughts together. I guess I should start by correcting an error on the previous journal. The tiger cubs are siberian not bengal. Though I did some checking and found that the differences are few, appearing to be mostly based on their appearance(oh, yeah, and size. Siberians are the largest felines in the world. Anyway, we arrived at about 1340 and went straight to the nursery where we were told we'd get to see the cubs after petting time, a time when they take one of the cubs out to be socialized among the visitors and such, then we'd get to go into the nursery to be with the animals. I guess I should make things a bit more clear than that. My mother and stepfather celebrated their ninth? tenth?*Shrugs* Whichever anniversary it is, by bottle feeding two of four siberian tiger cubs. My sister and I were playing photographers to the whole thing and we were right next to the cubs holding pen too. So, for about half an hour, we were, at times, within six inches of a trio (they fed one cub at a time) of three-month old tiger cubs. And damn, it was amazing. The enclosure is fenced by a four inch thick wooden wall with some sort of coating on it that prevents their claws from getting a grip, so every three minutes or so you'd see a cub come running at you, leap into the air...and pretty much bounce off the fence. Hilarious, it was. After feeding time for the cubs, we went out and looked at the rest of their animals. I'll say this, they have some beautiful examples of some of the largest animals in the world. Pretty much everwhere you look, there's another very large feline looking restlessly around. And I found out from one of the handlers why they were restless. Today was bone day. A day when each of the cats gets a large bone to chew on. It's supposed to be really good for the animals, as well as being a fairly rare treat. So all of their animals were pacing around their enclosures looking towards the back of the facility where, from what I was told, the food for the animals is stored. I'll say this, you have not truly felt threatened until you're watching a trio of six or seven hundred pound cats pacing on the other side of a fence seven feet away from you. The fence just seems so insignificant compared to the mass of the cats. And on top of all that, when you really look around and realize that even with the handlers and visitors, you're outnumbered by the cats about two to one...But anyway. Yeah...I need to go run the digital pictures I got through an editor and clean them up a little before I post them up here. And tomorrow I'm gonna go ahead and process a couple rolls of film and anything I like I'll scan into my computer and post here. So, yeah, today has been an epic day made of awesomeness and win.
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Grr...A family member was supposed to help me out with both remembering to develop my film and with the actual paying for such, but since that didn't pan out I won't be able to develop my film until Friday at the earliest, and probably not 'til Saturday.*Sighs*This is very irritating to me. I have five rolls of film to develop and I was hoping to only have to pay for the roll that needs to be shipped out to a lab. So, anyway, this update is courtesy of a very annoyed feline.