Today’s post on J. North Photography is about one of my favorite animals, the okapi. The reason I was having such a difficult time holding back the sarcasm was because of all the ridiculous things I heard from the people who came to see the okapi while I was photographing it. Judging from all the remarks I heard, almost no one has any clue what an okapi is. A few people wondered whether or not it was rare variety of zebra. One man marched right up and told his poor, impressionable son matter-of-factly that it WAS a zebra. Other people had no idea what it was and were asking each other if they knew. If they were kids, and their parents hadn't already passed on their ignorance to them, I told them myself. "It's called an okapi. It's related to the giraffe." I had to repeat myself many times that morning.
I heard some strange and ridiculous hypotheses as to what it might be while I was standing there. The most ridiculous of all, was from a person who was sure that it was not a real animal, but was the result of a donkey and a zebra deciding to get to know each other a little better. What do they teach in schools these days? Next they'll be telling me that a tiger is a baby lion who's mother fell in love with a carrot obsessed zebra!
>Sigh.< I suppose it’s understandable that some people don't know what it is. After all, okapis are very rare and few zoos have them. Still, you'd think that they could at least bother to read the sign posted on the fence before deciding that it's some kind of a weird zebra...
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