10-07-2017, 05:27 PM
This story hurts me so much. I used to work at a zoo, and had a daily show where I brought out three types of reptiles and talked about them and conservation issues. I loved that job, because I knew the animals had a great life and I was educating the public about how to protect wild animals. One summer we got a traveling stingray exhibition at our zoo. I didn't realize that our zoo was the first stop for these stingrays and that they had been taken straight from the ocean. It was an interactive exhibit, and guests could touch the stingrays. I spent part of my day on a microphone reciting the rules and guidelines for touching the stingrays. It was incredibly hard to get the crowd to comply with the rules. Everyday we found more stingrays dead. By the end if the summer they had all died. That summer still haunts me.