Written by Elle, Photos by Ema ~
Today was very fun! I went to an event by Little Ray’s Nature Centers. They are Canada’s largest exotic animal rescue with 1000 animals “in their care and take in between 200- 300 animals per year”. When we got there we got our stamp and started wandering. We saw many different animals. There were all sort of snakes, lizards, geckos, rabbits, birds, and more. We didn’t look around for long before the reptile presentation started.
The sloth was out for a minute and we took a quick picture before the presentation really began.
The first animal to be brought out was the… tortoise. We asked for the scary one and he brought out the scary tortoise. He told the front row to put out there hands just in case he tried getting away. I learned tortoise is a turtle but turtle is not tortoise which is quite interesting to me. When the guy asked the a little boy explained it and said he learned that from the poster right there and pointed at it making everyone giggle.
Soon it was time for the next animal and the man presenting said it was like a baby bunny but he liked this better because baby bunnies scared him and he brought out the… tarantula. I was very excited “yes!” I thought in my head. We learned no human is actually allergic to tarantula bites and there are no cases of someone dying from them. We also learned their bite is just like a bee sting but they prefer not to bite if they get scared and he used the example “if there was a bear in the room right now you wouldn’t go up and bite it on the ankle you would run”. He told us tarantulas rub their back legs on to their butt and shoot butt hairs at the problem like fiberglass pieces which can blind the object or hurt them so the tarantula can get away. Did you know the tarantula can go years without food? Crazy right. He talked more of the tarantula and then brought out the last thing a bull python. It was very big it was so so so cool. We didn’t learn much of the snake because soon the presentation was over.
But we got to pet, get a spider five, or let it walk across us. The first place we went was to the tarantula. The tarantula walked across me but stopped on my hand and waited which was cool. The spider felt like nothing really because it was so light but it was an amazing experience.
We wandered more and there was a giant lizard out, like a crocodile size it was so big.
We looked around and I admired the birds making me miss my blue.
Soon it was time for the next show, the mammal show. We sat down and prepared for the show. There were 3 animals like the other show and a different man. We met the opossum, the only animal there that actually lives here. The opossum is good because it eats ticks and ticks give us disease.
They bought out the sloth and talked about whether it’s best to be fast or slow or, strong or weak. And the answer was it depends. Sloths are the slowest creature and they have only 15% of their body dedicated to muscles. However they’ve been here for 64 million years. Sloths also only eat like a few millimeters at a time and they sleep 15-20 hours each day.
The next animal was the armadillo, Sissys favorite. They showed us that their heads a perfect triangle and so is their tail so they can roll in a perfect ball. Amazing right! They talked about the armadillo and then the show ended. We went to visit some more animals like the tarantula because sissy wanted to hold it.
We saw the tortoise and pet it, the opossum and pet it, some ferrets and pet them, and much more including a roach that I pet. Unfortunately they had to close so we said good bye and started to leave when I saw a macaw I wanted to say hi but sissy said we didn’t know the man and needed to go. I had lots of fun today and thought all the animals were amazing especially the porkie pine, tarantula, armadillo, birds, and tortoise.
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