"What is a Cassowary?"

Recently, the TV quiz show Jeopardy! featured a question (sorry, answer) for which the correct question was... "What is a cassowary?"  The contestants were unable to identify the pictured bird.

This of course led to lots of snickering on the Zookeeper Facebook community, with lots of "OMG, dummies don't even know what a cassowary is!"

Ok, let's be honest, though.  Outside of the range countries (Australia, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia)... how many people really do know what a cassowary is?  And for those that do know, how did they learn it?

I remember the first time I ever saw a picture of one.  My grandfather had gotten me a few packs of trading cards that depicted animals from the San Diego Zoo.  In that first pack was a card depicting a cassowary, and I was immediately entranced by it.  By some striking coincidence, later that same week I was watching one of my favorite cartoons - Batman: The Animated Series - with my brother, when what should happen to lurch across the screen but... a cassowary?  Yes, a cassowary, sicced on the Caped Crusader by the nefarious Penguin during a heist at the Gotham Zoo.

A year or so later, I saw my first zoo specimen.

My point is, no one taught me what a cassowary was in school - nor did anyone teach me what an echidna was, or a tuatara (or that it isn't a lizard), or any number of other animals.  Or what the difference is between a bison and a buffalo.  There was no class in high school biology where a patient teacher explained the difference between "venomous" and "poisonous."  There were classes on ecology and evolution and basic biology, but most of the nitty-gritty animal knowledge, I picked up myself, either studying on my own, watching esoteric nature programs, or going to the zoo.

There are times when we animal care folks - especially,  hate to say, those who are new to the field and reveling in our newfound glory - take too much pleasure in rubbing in our vast stores of useless knowledge...  it's one of the reasons that people hate watching any movie with us where an animal might appear, even for a second.



So no, I'm not going to laugh at some guy who doesn't know what a cassowary was, and I'll even give them points for guessing "emu," which is pretty darn close.  Instead, I'll be glad that cassowaries made it onto Jeopardy! at all.  Maybe seeing that big blue-headed murderbird on the screen, just for that instant, will inspire some kid to flip to Wikipedia and look it up.  And who knows where that will lead them.