The lion; King of the Jungle. International symbol of nobility. Ferocious, blood thristy hunter. And more recently, cuddly puppy. Let's break it down:
This week, visitors at a zoo in the People's Park of Luohe, China came to see a lion. What they saw was this:
Yeah, that's a dog.
Fresh out of lions, the zookeepers tried to fool visitors by placing a Tibetan Mastiff with a hairdo in a cage labeled 'African Lion.' According to the AFP, the zoo visitors figured that one out real fast when the thing started barking at the visitors. Oh, you know, because it was a dog.
The unclever rouse didn't go over so well with the visitors, who were furious that they paid to see a fuzzy wuzzy puppy instead of a lion. A fuzzy wuzzy puppy that is, in fact, so popular in China that people have been known to pay $750,000 for prize-winning canines. Basically, people knew exactly what they were looking at.
(Nope, still a dog.)
The dog-lion wasn't the only bogus exhibit at the zoo. The AFP reports there were other mislabed exhibits like a white fox in a leopard's den and another dog in a wolf pen.
The zoo responded by making a statement in the Oriental Daily that the "lions went to another zoo to breed." Right.The Huffington Post had a pretty spot-on response to that:
So, ladies and gentlemen, when your kids and grandkids ask you what a lion looks like, don't show them this:
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