POOP IN THE ZOO

Today my friend and I take a trip to the zoo.  We do this on a bit of a whim and with a mission.  (More on that mission in a future blog.)  There are two things that we do not know.  The first is that there is a cross-country meet going on around the zoo's perimeter, so there are tons of cars and giant buses for the cross country meet hogging up the zoo parking spaces.  We find a space over a mile away.  Unacceptable.  I bang a u-ey, drive back, and find a parallel parking spot much closer.

The other thing we do not know is that it is Stinky Saturday at the zoo.

We are at the zoo maybe ten minutes, if even, when we come upon a table with a young zoo worker setting up a display.  There are pictures and there are plastic and rubber piles of poop.  Yes, it's the match game!  We must match the poop to the animals that produced it.

Now, in a case of full disclosure, I have seen bear scat several times.  Fresh bear scat.  FRESH.  Fresh, as in, the bear pooped that stuff out recently, maybe even as recently as right before I arrived.  Bear scat looks like Silly Sand.  Giant Silly Sand.  For those not in the know, Silly Sand existed in the 70's and was pretty much colored wet powder that acted like wet beach sand, and we were supposed to create sculptures with it.  I'm not feeling so artistic with bear pooh, though.

I tell the girl, "This one looks like bear poop."  I point to the rubbery example.

"It's too small," she replies.

"Yeah, but it LOOKS like bear poop."

"But bear poop would be larger--"

"Look," I say, interrupting her, "I've seen bear scat, and that's exactly what it looks like."  She very politely but firmly tells me that, well, apparently I am full of shit because my shit-matching is wrong.  Wrong on so many levels.  Admitting defeat, I move on.  "The one looks like bloody kidney beans ... Either that or someone ate at Chile's last night."  It's a different color than the others, and the bat is the only nocturnal animal out of them all.  I am correct.  Bat = Bloody kidney beans.

My friend matches every single poop correctly.  She is the Poop Winner.  She is Princess of Poop.  Ten minutes into our visit (her first to this zoo), and already we are showing our areas of expertise: Shit.  This is when all those days of feeding our kids weird textures and colors of food and changing diapers pay off.  With all of our degrees and training, apparently we are the Doctors of DooDoo.