El Zoologico...Petrobras style

A couple of days back we had the pleasure of checking out the Santa Cruz Zoo. It has a reputation of being one of the best zoos in South America, so we were intrigued to say the least.

The highlight for me was watching a sloth lazily making its way around the zoo, free as a bird, inhibited only by its own speed. They´re such interesting animals which has got me thinking what the world must be like through their eyes...

Obviously the conditions for some of the animals were below what you´d expect in most North American zoos with respect to cage size, which was certainly hard to see...however what was even more surprising was the sheer disrespect people had for signs indicating not to feed the animals. We saw children dumping entire bags of colourful cookies into an ostrich pen...yikes!

On top of this we were left with a sour taste in our mouths by the fact that Petrobras (the national oil company of Brazil) sponsors the zoo and is not shy about advertising all the good they´re doing for the people, animals and environment of Bolivia. We think that having more zoo staff on hand to encourage better behaviour towards the animals might be a good place to funnel some extra cash.