Yesterday Granny Artemis & I were driving around to nurseries when we spotted in a Ford sales lot an ad hoc "petting zoo" so we pulled in there & jumped out of the car. There were lots of young mothers standing around outside the corral watching their kids with the animals, a few teenagers inside the corral, but like only one full grown adult playing with animals. It was SLIGHTLY embarrassing to be an adult eager to play with baby animals, but hey, if those young mothers outside the corral had lost their sense of joy interacting with animals, that's just sad for them.
Granny Artemis & I sat on the floor of the corral & were visited & nibbled on by a Patagonian cavy about three times the size of a regular guinea pig, a baby potbelly pig about the size of a big loaf of bread, a half dozen baby pygmy goats hardly any bigger than large cats, a full-sized nanny goat who was present so that the baby pygmy goats wouldn't get dehydrated for need of milk, a de-horned bottle-raised Zebu (a miniature but very wild type of cow that I've never seen so tame before; they're usually hinky around strangers), an elderly dwarf horse smaller than a great dane who loved to be scratched around his ears & cheeks, plus a yab-yab-yab-yabbering duck, & what else, oh yeah, a bunch of children. It was great.
-paghat the ratgirl