Today, I went on an investigation to the zoo instead of working in the classroom.

We walked to the zoo from our school instead of taking the bus! On the walk, we walked single-file in our groups. My group leader was Ms. Shrestha, the assistant teacher from my class. There were five groups. There was Ms. Bloor, Ms. Amatiya, Ms. Middleton, Ms. Westlake and Ms. Shrestha. There were 6 kids in my group. Their names were Jack, Kasem, Freida, Suravi, Neenama and me. The two teachers in our group were Ms. Shrestha and Ms. Silwal. At the zoo, we had to finish four activities before we walked back to school. These activities were: a zoo questionnaire in which you had to ask people different questions ; sketch an animal that you liked ; find out information about the animals ; draw a tally chart of how close to extinction the animals are. Right when we got to the zoo, we ate our snack. We played around for a bit after eating our snack and I took a photo of two of my friends, William and Pemba.

Then we went to the deer. One of the swamp deer had horns and the other did not. The swamp deer were HUGE compared to the spotted deer. We found out that the swamp deer’s lifespan was only 19-20 years. I estimated that the swamp deer were only 16 years old. Next we went to the hippo. The hippo only poked its snout out of the water. I got the photo just before the hippo got back in the water.

We were about to go towards the tigers when Jack spotted that we didn’t go to the rhino. The rhino was huge compared to the swamp deer. He was eating grass when we were at his enclosure. The rhino looked very sad because the other rhinos of his type were separated into different enclosures.

Then we went to the water buffalos. The water buffalos were very far away from us. Water buffalos weigh approximately 800 – 900 kilograms. When we were at their big enclosure, they were drinking water from a very dirty pond. There were about 7 water buffalos in their enclosure.

After the water buffalo, we saw the jackals. Their enclosure was very smelly because they use urine to communicate with other jackals!

Then we went to the Asian elephants. They were HUGE compared to the jackal! We found out that the Asian elephant could live more than 70 years long. Later on, we saw someone riding an elephant straight through the zoo. I thought that elephant was an Asian elephant. The man was riding the elephant through the zoo because he was taking the elephant to the area where the people were waiting to pet the elephant. I got to pet the elephant’s ear, it was very soft. The side of the elephant was much rougher compared to the ear.

Next we went to the huge bird section. I spotted a very colorful bird that looked like a tiger! The bird section wasn’t as entertaining as the monkeys, water buffaloes and tigers.

Towards the end we went to the crocodiles. These crocodiles had a very long snout. It looked like a corpse in the sand because it was very sunny and the animals were very still.

After our visit to the zoo, a few days later, we had a debate whether we should have zoos or not. Everybody said we should not have zoos except Gyaljen. Our conclusions were that we should keep animals in national parks instead of zoos because it is cruel to keep animals in cages, but if we let them out into the wild, they might get killed by hunters and they would be extinct. So, we agreed on the conclusion that we should keep animals in protected national parks.
I really enjoyed going to the zoo because of the big variety of animals!