Symptoms include sneezing, swollen eyes, loss of arms...
We recently found out that Micky is allergic to tigers. We knew she suffered a bit when exposed to the household moggy and hypothesised that this might scale to the bigger cats, but we didn't have any experimental data. Until now, that is. It was all going fine at the time, but by the evening she looked like that bit in the latest Star Wars where Palpatine becomes (more) evil.
For my birthday, we went to the Zion Wildlife Gardens near Whangarei in Northland. About a 2 1/2-hour drive north of Auckland. They filmed a television series there called The Lion Man, about the big cats who live there and the people who look after them. The Lion Man himself is Craig Busch, who in typical Kiwi style trained as a motorcycle mechanic, went for his OE and came back with a real live lion. It happens all the time here, darling...
We saw lots of lovely cats and got to spend 20 minutes or so making friends with two hulking six-month-old Bengal tiger cubs called Indira and Kahli. It was utterly wonderful, and we discovered the following facts:
Tigers like chasing dangly things like balls of string, camera straps, and loose clothing.
Tiger fur is soft, but not as soft as that of house-cats. They are much more stylish though.
Tigers make a chuffing noise when happy, and a sort of grizzling sound when they're cross.
Having a tiger's mouth wrapped around your leg is unnerving at the time, but makes for a good story later.
Tigers aren't mad keen on being scratched behind the ears.
Tigers and garden furniture don't mix.
We also learnt some more traditional tiger facts, but I won't go into that now since I'll probably get it wrong, and anyway, the internet is full of better places to learn stuff than here.
Photo gallery from the trip to Zion
Even the drive up was exciting - I skidded the rental car going round a corner on a gravel road. I thought I was going at a fairly gentle pace, but the road thought differently. Pleasingly, all those years playing Gran Turismo paid off handsomely and I did exactly the right thing to control the car and get it going the right way again. Phew.
I hope to post a few more pictures from Zion later, and I realise there hasn't been much happening here recently. Hopefully I can get back in the habit...