ACROSS THE RIVER
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UP UNTIL last week I had never slept with a giraffe.
The weirdest thing I had ever slept with before was Peter Cupitt and that was 40 odd years ago.
I should explain.
A few of us had been at a ball out Burraga way and when we got back late at night to the farmhouse where we were staying, there was only one spare bed left.
It was a double bed, so we had no choice.
But we took the necessary precautions.
Our logical brains, after a long night out, decided we needed a barrier to keep us well apart.
Didn't want people getting the wrong idea, so we found a vacuum cleaner in a cupboard, dumped it down the middle of the bed then crawled safely into our separate sides.
Not sure what the lady of the house thought the next morning when she brought in a cup of tea and found two blokes sharing a double bed with a vacuum cleaner.
BUT let us get back to giraffes.
The other day Barbara and I slept with four of those lovely long-legged critters.
Well not exactly in the same bed, but living together for a night inside the fence at Dubbo's Western Plains Zoo.
The giraffes were our neighbours and aren't they sweet gentle elegant things?
To think the despotic Ugandan president, Idi Amin, encouraged his soldiers to go out and shoot giraffes as target practice is undeniably despicable.
Same with the magnificent rhinoceros.
Poachers have decimated the population, illegally harvesting horns to sell to rich Chinese men, who naively think this will also make them horny.
Fools!
ONE of the best things about sleeping inside Dubbo Zoo is the opportunity you get to see (and hear) animals after dark and first thing in the morning, when nobody else is around.
And you are shown around after-hours by delightful staff who are passionate about their animals.
You learn so much behind-the-scenes about breeding programs and get shown the precise management regimes for some of the many animal species in the Western Plains Zoo.
Did you know, for example that the closest relative of the hippopotamus in the animal kingdom are whales?
African elephants can't breed with Asian elephants and, despite their long necks, giraffes have the same number of vertebrae as humans.
You also learn that all the animal poo is collected on Fridays, piles of the stuff.
The poo from the herbivores is used on the garden, but the stuff from the carnivores must be separately managed because of possible pathogens and of course, the putrid smell.
THE highlight for me was watching a huge, primeval looking hippopotamus emerge from a dark waterhole at night, gobble up some food then demonstrate his famous territory marking trick, performed with a vigorous swishing tail and a seemingly endless torrent of hippo poo.
Visualise a big hippopotamus letting fly a huge amount of steaming poo into an electric fan and you will get the picture.
"God I wish I could do that," muttered a fellow camper, who, like me, was captivated by the magic of seeing something we will probably never see again as long as we live.
Much more impressive than the Mona Lisa, Stonehenge or even the Big Potato, I reckon.
NOT long after the zoo opened in 1977, I remember seeing big mob of kangaroos in a paddock beside the cheetah enclosure.
The cheetah was in heaven watching those tasty marsupials bouncing around.
All you could see of the cheetah above the high grass was an excitedly twitching tail as he fantasised about the possibility of a bounding take-away for dinner.
Actually Dudley and his mate Clyde were at Dubbo Zoo around then.
They stepped over the fence to take a short-cut through the kangaroo paddock to the elephant enclosure. Out of nowhere the cheetah appeared in front of them.
They momentarily froze.
"Glad I wore my joggers, Clyde," said Dudley, "I should be able to run to safety."
"You'll never outrun this bugger," said Clyde, "they're bloody quick."
"Don't have to, Clyde," said Dudley, "just have to outrun you mate."
ANYHOO why not spend a night inside Western Plains Zoo yourself sometime?
The accommodation is splendid, the food superb and you get a rare opportunity to have a peek behind-the-scenes into one of the best zoos in the world - a memorable experience and one we certainly will never forget.