Please DO Feed the Animals!
Did you know that a Southern Sea Otter eats five meals a day? Well, one who resides at Audubon Aquarium does, anyway. That can add up to more than 20 pounds of seafood a day, according to the Audubon Institute’s Web Site. The otters’ snack of choice is an ice-cold seafood popsicle that comes as part of a specialized diet planned by their nutritionists at the Institute. They are just a few of the more than 15,000 animals living at Audubon, all of whom are fed according to meal plans designed especially for them.
It takes more than $60,000 to foot just part of the animals’ monthly grocery bill, the Web site says, with that amount spent just on grain and hay for the Zoo animals alone. Imagine the dent you’d put in your pocketbook if you had a 20 to 50 pound per day appetite in addition to the rising cost of fuel and grain shortages that are already inflating the cost of groceries. And imagine if you had to rely on somebody else to procure that sustenance for you. A trip to the grocery on the way home from work for a $6.99 gallon of milk doesn’t sound so bad anymore does it?
I mention this because as I’ve been researching some other projects on nutrition, animals, etc. today, I discovered the most adorable fundraising program I think I’ve ever seen. If you think the Adopt-A-Zoo-Animal programs out there were cute wait till you see Audubon’s Feed the Animal program.
On Audubon’s Web site, there’s a place where you can offer to feed an animal or group of animals for a day, a week, or even just a snack: feed a penguin for a day, a sea turtle for a week, or put your donation toward seafood popsicles for otters or a fruit salad bed time snack for the gorillas; there are plenty of options to choose from. Of course, you don’t actually get to prepare the food or feed it to the animals, but it’s a fun way to give a contribution, especially with such topical issues as rising costs of agricultural products, a tightening food supply, and issues of nutrition and organics at play in the world today.
Next time you’re weighing produce at the farmers’ market or heading to the freezer section at your local grocer, you might consider donating a meal to the animals as well.
