Disturbingly adorable even-toed ungulate

Cat Pie Hurts — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 07:34:39 -0800

Monifa, "I am lucky" in Yoruba, is the world's newest and cutest pygmy hippo, born into captivity at NSW, Australia's Taronga Zoo.

"Exhibited each afternoon during September."

CunningLinguist — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 06:16:54 -0800

Bought from a slave trader and put on display at the Bronx zoo: the strange, sad story of Ota Benga, a Pygmy with filed teeth brought from the Congo to America in 1906. Here are a couple of contemporary news accounts of the controversial exhibit. After the zoo, Benga tried to make a life in America, studying to be a missionary. "But what he really wanted to do was to tell everyone in this country that his people were dying, and why. I think he thought that eventually they'd listen. But they never did. That, to me, is the real tragedy." In 1916, at the age of 32, he built a ceremonial fire, chipped off the caps on his teeth, performed a final tribal dance, and shot himself with a stolen pistol. Creationists say the story illustrates "the racism of evolutionary theory" and "the horrors that evolutionary theory has brought to society."

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Disturbingly adorable even-toed ungulate

"Exhibited each afternoon during September."