Take Your Sweetie To The Zoo For Valentine's Day - They Are Having Animal Sex Tours

[matcom]

<snip>

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) -- Genevieve Chandler has been visiting the Lowry Park Zoo since she was a kid, but the tour she got the other night was definitely not the G-rated fare of her childhood.

Among the things Chandler, 30, and her date learned on their "Wild at Heart" zoo tour: Male pigs have a unique corkscrew endowment and impressive, um, output; manatees have orgies and don't really care if their partners are male or female; and a male porcupine has only one four-hour window a year to mate - very carefully, of course.

Valentine's Day is the time of year when zoos around the nation seek to woo a new adult audience with risque tours that couple champagne, chocolate-covered strawberries and candlelight dining with impressive facts about how animals do the wild thing.

Credit for the concept goes to Jane Tollini, a former penguin keeper at the San Francisco Zoo. Tollini conceived the idea two decades ago while watching her penguins' courtship ritual, which culminates in what she describes as "bowling pins making love."

"The keepers get there early and we see things that other people don't see," Tollini said. "And I went, 'My God, that's fascinating.' You know the old Peter Sellers line, 'I like to watch?' You kind of go, 'Oh my, my, my. How big? How many? How far?' It was unbelievable."

She set the ritual to Johnny Mathis - the makeout tunes of her generation - pitched it to her bosses and a new zoo tradition was born. The idea soon spread to other zoos.

San Francisco calls it "Woo at the Zoo." New York City's Central Park Zoo calls it "Jungle Love." Zoo marketing folks in Boise, Idaho, named the tour "Wild Love at the Zoo."

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/Z/ZOO_SEX_TOURS_FLOL-?SITE=FLTAM&SECTION=US

[mainegreen]

1. FLORIDA! n/t