Misidentified Animals

I've heard many, including some weird ones

Asian Small-Clawed Otter - "Clawed Sea Otter"
North American River Otter - "Seal"
Sea Lion - "Seal"
Any sort of lemur - "Monkey"
Maned Wolf - "Fox"
A type of pheasant that used to be at the National Zoo - "Gross Turkey"
Southern Tamandua - "Monkey"

and so on...

 

Gross turkey is kinda funny though...

 

A while back when I was visiting Helsinki zoo, I was watching the Steller’s sea eagles when suddenly I heard a kid yell at the top of his lungs “MURICA!!!” most likely thinking the eagles were bald eagles. A pretty easy mistake to make for a kid, but I still wanted to include it because I thought it was funny.

 

And I assume that kid was an American tourist?

 

A kid called a Gila Monster a snake at the Henry Vilas Zoo yesterday. And then his mother pronounced “Gila” with a hard G. The urge to “um, actually” was strong, but I resisted.

 

To be fair, if you've never heard a word said out loud, it can be kind of a guess. I think there are a lot of words I mispronounce because I've never heard them out loud, ha ha.

Not quite misidentification, but when there's a pop culture character that is a species a lot of people don't otherwise remember the name of, they'll refer it by the name of the character. Coquerel's sifaka is always Zoboomafoo. Every time.

 

I don’t really know if he was American or Finnish but I would assume he was just Finnish because I didn’t really hear him or his family speak English.

 

I went to a talk by a lemur expert. She pronounced 'sifaka' as 'Shef**k'. It would probably be better if visitors did not pronounce it the right way.

 

I assume this has been said, but at my local zoo, people constantly confuse African Wild Dogs with Hyenas. There is even a sign that says, “we are not hyenas”, but that doesn’t stop anyone

 

Th

 

Last Sunday, at the Buffalo Zoo, I heard a little kid, couldn't have been more than four, call a polar bear a "dog with teeth". While it doesn't bother me for little kids to misidentify animals they're likely unfamiliar with (and in this case the parents told the kids it's a "bear"), but it's always interesting to hear these sorts of misidentifications as they show how kids are processing the animals, and in this case it's extremely understandable how a little kid could think a bear is a dog. What was less understandable was a few years ago now when I heard a kid call a spurred tortoise a "kitty".

 

This implies that the kid thought dogs didn't have teeth though?

 

I can sort of understand this one because the kid likely thought the tortoise was a tortoiseshell cat and took the name literally.

 

Or more likely the kid just called all animals "kitties"? I know I did as a toddler.

 

Kids can be forgiven for animal misidentification since they're still working on their mental definitions of animals, and zoos can hold animals that aren't necessarily within the "normal" child animal experience. Although just because it's developmentally appropriate doesn't mean we're not allowed to find it amusing.

 

The strangest case of misidentification I've seen (not personnally but in old videos) was the Grey Seal Bobby, representent of a common species in Northern Europe (with small colonies in France), once kept in the small former zoo of the Tours Botanical Gardens ; the municipality bought it from a fishmonger.
This animal has been (according to the signage) labelled as a... Weddell Seal Leptonychotes weddellii, a species native to Antarctica and probably never kept in French zoos.
I don't understand even the reason of such a mislabelling, given that there isn't any taxonomical or geographical reason for the confusion, and that I can even hardly see any willing to lure the public (that wasn't aware about the different species of seals, and that wouldn't especially prefer to see one seal species than another more "common").
You can see the signage in this short video :
Ville de Tours on Instagram: "Bobby, la star du jardin botanique Elle est arrivée à Tours il y a 70 ans, le 6 février 1953. Qui l'a connue ?"

 

Just heard an Okapi called a pygmy zebra.
And an Okapolis!

 

Okapi Metropolis .......

An almost lovely idea.

 

Not to be confused with Roast turkey

 

According to ZTL, Weddell seals have been kept at Antwerp, Edinburgh and Hamburg