Quote:
Originally Posted by FinLady
Kay, thanks for the pics as always. Those are some nice animals. It's rather interesting that the zoo is mainly for rescue animals.
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it's a fascinating place, run by a really cool lady, with a great back-story:
Sharon is more at home in the jungle than most of us are in our mother's kitchen. An American by birth, she's spent the past quarter century in the raw tropical landscape of Central America. In the fall of 1982 she left the United States to work as an assistant on a nature documentary being filmed in Belize. At the end of the shoot, the director left her in possession of a jaguar, two macaws, a ten-foot boa constrictor, and seventeen other animals. "Once you domesticate wild animals, they can't care for themselves in the wild," Sharon told me. "If you turn them out they'll starve." So she painted a sign that said Belize Zoo and stuck it beside the lonely road that runs from Belize City to the Guatemalan border. People came.
Today the zoo exhibits 125 individual animals and hosts more than seventy thousand visitors every year — more than one-quarter of Belize's entire population. It is the country's most visited tourist attraction and one of the region's most prestigious scientific research stations. Belizean children idolize Sharon Matola. She invites them to the zoo and holds a tarantula in her palm, wraps a boa around her leg, and speaks to April the tapir as her friend. In the eyes of children she lives a magical life, padding through her own zoo like Willy Wonka strolling the chocolate factory floor. Sharon often buzzes through the countryside on a Kawasaki 650 motorcycle, and when children see her coming they jump and wave and shout her name: Zoo Lady!
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/bo...nt&oref=slogin
