Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Truth, stranger than
Here’s a photo from a viral email my sis sent me:
Endangered pork
The email comes with the following explanation, as long as a number of other similar photos:
In a zoo in California , a mother tiger gave birth to a rare set of triplet tiger cubs.
Unfortunately, due to complications in the pregnancy, the cubs were born prematurely
and due to their tiny size, they died shortly after birth.The mother tiger after recovering from the delivery, suddenly started to decline in health,
although physically she was fine. The veterinarians felt that the loss of her litter had caused
the tigress to fall into a depression. The doctors decided that if the tigress could surrogate
another mother’s cubs, perhaps she would improve.
And so forth. As I usually do with viral emails, I checked Snopes.com for the real deal. The true story is quite a bit more disturbing. At the Sriracha Zoo in Thailand, zookeepers have set up a number of such odd displays, all for the entertainment of jaded animal . . . um . . . lovers? Tigers giving suck to piglets, pigs giving suck to tiger cubs, dogs and pigs and tigers living in harmony, you name it. All in good fun, perhaps, except this particular zoo has some a few loathsome skeletons in its closet. Read more at Snopes.
D.
You know, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered one of those email thingies that actually had it right even when they weren’t outright falsehoods. Maybe I’m wrong – maybe there have been a few, but it sure seems like every one of them has been either substantially or totally incorrect.
My sister, fortunately, leaves the ‘RE:’ at the front of all the ones she forwards, allowing me to filter them out.
In the Snopes article, the link to the AWI Quarterly (Animal Welfare Institute) article was broken. By coincidence, my youngest daughter was a communications associate for AWI for several years in D.C. where she was in charge of the AWI Quarterly. She is home visiting and provided the correct link to their article: http://www.awionline.org/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/1907/pid/2506
Dean: and I have this really bad habit of checking out every single one at Snopes 🙂
Lucie: thanks for repairing the link!
I love reading the Snopes site. Some of the stuff is just so out there, it’s great. Especially all the doctored photographs.
And I finally have the ‘rents trained to check the validity of anything they’re about to forward to other people on the Snopes site.
Wonder if my Sis is reading this. If Kris can get her parents to check Snopes, maybe I can get my sister to do the same 😉