• Join The Fed
• Advertise with The Fed

• About Us
• Contact

In This Issue

• Kicking Your Hamster in its Teeth
• X-treme Zoos Target Market
• Resurrecting the Chili Cheese Burrito
• Sonic in Bad Shape
• Journey into the Land of the Leopards
• Finding Boys Into Whom to Put Love
• Lions and Tigers and Bears, Go Buy!
• Murder Spree Continues
• Art With Dead Mice
• Puppy Love, the Wrong Way
• 19th Century Nursery Rhyme!
• Tender Moments with Bill and Reona
• Bibu the Baby Elephant
• Rob's Relationship Corner
• Marauding Interviewer: What's Your Spirit Animal?
• THEY WATCH
• Letters to the Feditor
• Thyroid Boy
• Interspecies Intellectual Masturbation
• Stickman Theatre

Stephanie Quan

You may need to sign a waiver to enter, but it's worth it.

Stephanie Quan

Recently, the Philadelphia Review on Public Zoos came out with some astounding findings: apparently zoos are no longer as popular a draw among the 9-17 demographic as they once were. Where zoos were once packed with an overwhelming mess of schoolchildren giggling at the fact that a monkey was peeing in public, they are now a ghost land of prostitutes and the homeless. The main reasons cited for this demographic shift were a lack of interesting animal behaviors to witness and the overall unpleasant smell of animal feces festering in the warm August sun.

"With the flood of Internet and television resources, kids just don't seem to care much about real animals anymore," says local zookeeper Mark Flan. "If you had the choice between seeing a real animal or seeing a Fox television special with animals ,wouldn't you pick Fox? I've always wondered who was stronger, an elephant or a couple dozen midgets. I mean really, our pachyderms spend most of the day sleeping and eating. Would you honestly pay to watch a really fat mammal sit around and get fatter? I can do that at home!" Animals were always the key draw of the zoo, and now, thanks to their exploitation elsewhere, the zoo seems to be a second best for people interested in feeling better about their hairless-monkey-selves.

Ex-zoo-goer Holland Fry thinks the problem isn't the animals but the content. "I used to frequent zoos like no other. I mean I was here for the 9:30 feeding, the 10:30 feeding and you better fucking believe I was around for the 3pm Snack-O-Rama! But these days it's getting old. Now the only thing that's even remotely interesting are the random times the animals start to, you know-get at it. And that doesn't happen often enough. The zoo would be a lot more interesting if they had more animal-on-animal action, particularly of the interspecies kind." Are zoos going to disappear forever from our urban landscape because of a lack of nookie?

The future looks grim, but luckily for today's zoo-goers, this study most likely will only strengthen our nation's current zoo system and allow them to adapt to the changing interests of Americans. Even as this article is being printed, zoos around the nation are taking action. Taking a note from chip manufacture Frito-Lay, zoos everywhere have been "eXtreming" their animals. "No longer will you see a hippopotamus bathing in the mud, now you'll see him bathing in the mud, with a wig on!" says enthusiastic zoo reform supporter Barbra Phillips. Viewers of the prototypes are ecstatic about the new state of zoos. Tripped out teenager Reena Solomon says, "It's like before the animals were at a two or maybe even a three, but no higher than three and a half. Now it's like rhino on eleven!!!" Other plans in the works aren't quite as drastic as the wig-hippo exhibit but are equally as eXtreme.

In order to compensate for the dearth in animal sex, the zoos will now be adding a small amout of Viagra to all of the animals' diets. This will most likely increase the amount of public doggy style by at least 40%. If animal sex isn't a big enough draw, plans to start a new exhibition with violence are also in the works. Going off of the fame of television shows where a bunch of nerds assemble a robot to battle, zoos are assembling teams of crack biologists and weapons smiths to transform animals into battle-beings! Already in production are astro-platypus and atomic-emu. Their debut will come this May.

As if that weren't enough raw carnality, zoos are also recreating carnality that may have happened some time in the past. You guessed it: animatronic dinosaur battles. "This was always just looking us in the face," said zoo manager Bob Sacamento. "We've had these giant dinosaur animatronics for so long, but they've never been in the least bit interesting. Now our visitors will get to see how the Jurassic Age really was, filled with tons of violent dinosaur matchups."

It seems as if the zoos will be able to successfully pull out of this slump if they manage their resources carefully and monitor the level of eXtreme. Columbia Professor of the eXtreme Bob Gramh said, "One must be careful on raising the eXtreme quality that an object has. In some cases it may end up ‘keeping it real' to the ‘eXtreme' and that would be disastrous. I'll remind the readers of Chicago's HP Syndrome during the early 90's."

Regardless of the potential for mass destruction, zoos around the world have been boasting big plans for the new millennium and I for one can't wait to see what the future brings.