MICHELLE STARR
8 FEB 2019
Valentine's Day. It's for
suckers, right? A Hallmark holiday designed just to part you with your money.
But El Paso Zoo in Texas can help you celebrate in a way that will warm the
cockles of your cold, black heart - and it won't cost you a thing.
In a livestreamed event called
"Quit Bugging Me", zoo staff will feed their adorable meerkats a
cockroach named after your villainous ex. All you have to do is send
them a Facebook message with your ex's first name and last initial.
Then you can load up the
February 14 livestream
on the zoo's website and cackle with vindicated glee as that miscreant
is shredded by tiny sharp meerkat teeth.
(El Paso Zoo)
"This is a fun way to get
the community involved in our daily enrichment activities," Sarah Borrego
of El Paso Zoo told
CBS News.
"The meerkats love to get
cockroaches as a snack and what better way to celebrate Valentine's Day than by
feeding them a cockroach named after your ex!"
Meerkats are a type of
mongoose, native to the deserts of South Africa, where conditions are arid and
food resources are scarce. They primarily live on
scorpions and insects - they have a natural immunity to snake and
scorpion venom - but will also eat reptiles, birds, small rodents, plants, eggs
and frogs.
They're well known for
their sentry
behaviour, taking turns to climb to a high vantage point to keep an eye out
for threats while the rest of the meerkat mob forage for food. When the sentry
barks the alarm, the mob scatters to the safety of their underground burrows.
Because of their specific
dietary requirements, the meerkats will only be fed one roach each - the bugs
are very calorie-rich, a special treat - and remaining roaches will be fed to
the zoo's monkeys.
According to the BBC, over
1,500 names have been sent in so far, so there's a chance your ex will never
see the inside of a meerkat's gullet specifically.
That's OK - the zoo is also
going ahead with a name-and-shame, posting the names to social media from
February 11. But if you want a surer bet, a few other zoos are offering
name-a-cockroach promotions too.
Hemsley Conservation Centre in
the UK will let you name a
roach for a donation of £1.50 (US$2), Bronx Zoo will let you name
a Madagascan hissing cockroach for
US$15 (and is also selling roach merch), and Zoo Boise has the service for US$10 -
although you can get a discount if you pair it with a zoo tour.
None of these zoos will be
feeding their roaches to other animals, so perhaps it's not fair to the poor
insects to have to live with the name of a miserable lowlife. That's your call,
really.
But one thing is for certain:
Valentine's Day has never been this much fun.
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