Another Day at the Zoo

In the earlier days of shopping malls, it was not uncommon to see a petting zoo in the mall for several weeks, together with some small carnival rides, as a promotion to attract customers.  The petting zoos typically contained small farm animals and a few exotics.   A pen was erected in the mall, and every morning and evening, the animal “wranglers” would march the animals through the mall to and from their cages in their travel trailers.  On one occasion, the petting zoo included a six foot tall ostrich.  The first several days of their performance went well.  The next night, the floor crew put down 2 coats of sealer and 4 coats of wax on the terrazzo floor from the entrance to center court.   I was walking the center with the operations director early the next morning before the mall opened, and watched the wrangler escorting the ostrich in from the trailer.  The ostrich, being a 2-toed beast started to slip on the freshly waxed floor as if it were in a skating rink.  The ostrich lost it, fell down, and rolled on its back into a defensive position, which apparently they do as a matter of instinct.  The ostrich had a common female name, like “Debbie”, and the wrangler spoke to it softly, helped it roll back over and get on its feet.  The ostrich made some headway, slipping and sliding, and after taking a number of gangly steps fell down again.  The wrangler rolled it over as before and helped it to its feet.  By this time we were near the stage at center court in front of the jewelry stores, and had almost caught up to the ostrich and wrangler.  The bird took another spill, and had apparently had enough of this.  When the wrangler made a move to bend down once again to help the fallen bird, the ostrich thrust out his 2-toed foot and struck the wrangler in the chest with such force that it made a loud “WHUMP” sound as it knocked him on his rear.  The wrangler immediately let out a blood-curdling yell and struggled to regain his composure and get back up.  Since the rest of the mall hadn’t yet received the new wax, the wrangler was able to coax the bird down to its pen at the other end of the mall.  Once we figured out that we didn’t need to call the paramedics, we laughed until we cried.  The promotion would probably have been more successful if we billed it as a "boxing ostrich and friends", instead of just a petting zoo.