Warts and All

"Notoriety wasn't as good as fame, but it was heaps better than obscurity."

- Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens

When researching the Colorado river toad, it was difficult to find as much info as I would have liked about the actual natural history of the species.  Most articles that I read about it were primarily focused on the properties of the poisons secreted from the toad, and what happens to curious humans who ingest those secretions.  Which, I guess is kind of fair.  There are thousands of species of frogs and toads in the world, many of which very little is known about.  What puts this species on the radar of so many folks is that fact that some people, ill-advisedly, have taken to licking them.

There are a number of species out there which have, through one way or another, achieved some kind of notoriety.  Ask a layperson about bonobos, and you may hear them tell you a lot about the sex lives of the apes.  Ask about the cassowary, and you may get a lecture about how lethal they can be.  I don't think I've ever seen a social media post about hippos (including pygmy hippos, for which the fact really doesn't apply) that didn't have tons of comments proclaiming them Africa's deadliest animals.  And there's a ton of crazy info out their about the sex lives and reproductive anatomy of animals that I'm not even gonna touch here...

And sometimes we, as zoo professionals and educators, get a little lazy and use these scandalous facts as a hook to attract visitors to a species... but we don't really dive deeper than them to show the visitor the whole, actual animal.  Instead, the animal gets reduced to a quirky fact, which often gets exaggerated out of any proportion, might actually be very inaccurate, and in some cases comes to define the animal.  

Our animals are complex.  They are unique.  They are multifaceted.  And there's more to them than whether or not they are lickable.