Bringing Our Zoo To You

I remember last year reading this strangely macabre article about how the Neumünster Zoo was planning on feeding its animals to each other if they didn’t get enough visitors to sustain their operations.

Great way to attract visitors, I’d say. I’d pay good money to see a grizzly bear hunt an elephant. (Just kidding. Do I look like a Roman to you?)

But anyway, all this realisation that zoos basically have the same operating costs whether they’re opened or closed made me think: is there a way to ensure that they remain profitable even in Covid times?

Searching around, I did see that zoos were trying out various programmes to engage people. Live streamed zoos. Entertaining images where zookeepers showed exotic animals to each other.

But all of them had the same problem: you still weren’t physically in contact with the animals, which is the whole point of zoos.

Now, of course as I say this I realise that most zoos don’t actually allow you to touch the animals. (Might I remind anyone of Harambe?) But you know what I mean. What’s the point of watching zoo animals on the Internet when you can literally watch wild animals on the Internet?

Obviously zoos needed an extra edge to remain competitive against National Geographic and BBC Earth.

Sitting in my digital editing class, I came up with a solution: a zoo programme called “Bringing Our Zoo To You”.

And then I made an ad for it.

For the sake of entertainment, I’ll let you watch it now. (Oh yes, as you will notice, all of it is found footage. Which is why it doesn’t appear on my YouTube channel, because I don’t want to get ten million copyright strikes.)

Thank you for watching my video. Please support this programme so that it’ll become a reality. Because I really want a Komodo dragon wandering through my house. (Just kidding. This programme is entirely fictional. I don’t want to see a Komodo in my kitchen.)