A Beastly Way to Educate Kids

Daisondrai Harris imitated an anteater Saturday by using a straw to suck up bits of paper the size of postage stamps.

The 5-year-old Cerritos boy said the task was easy enough. But would he want to be an anteater rather than a person?

“No,” he answered firmly.

And why not?

“Because they eat ants.”

Harris was one of hundreds of youngsters who participated in the Santa Ana Zoo’s third Zoo Olympics on Saturday. The annual event aims to educate children about the animal world by having them mimic animal habits.

In six events, children ran like cheetahs, jumped like kangaroos and hung upside down like sloths. They also imitated anteaters, flamingos and the naked mole rat, aptly named for its absence of fur.

Photos of the animals and brief descriptions of their characteristics were available at each event.

The participants soon learned that they could not match their skills to those of the animals, nor would they want to.

“You do more stuff as a Cub Scout,” said Ryan Blekier, 10, explaining that camp-outs for kids are far more exciting than the everyday lives of animals like the naked mole rat, which lives in tunnels and is blind.

To get an idea of how the animal lives, Blekier put a bandanna over his eyes and felt his way through a maze. Though the challenge was not difficult, Blekier said, he felt weird being blindfolded.

All the while, he said, he kept telling himself: “I’m going to make it all the way through.”

Some children used their legs to dangle upside down from pull-up bars, like sloths, and tried to beat the endurance records of previous animal imitators.

At one point, the record holder was Jazzmine Small, 9, who hung upside down for 7 minutes, 48 seconds. The problem, she said, was not the blood rushing to her head but her leg muscles.

“It hurts,” she said, explaining why she would never want to be a sloth.

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Animals do have some advantages, though, the children readily admitted. The sloth can sleep hanging upside-down from trees. And the kangaroo can jump almost 30 feet in one hop.

By comparison, Christina Perez, 11, managed to jump just over 5 feet.

“That’s amazing,” she said when she learned what a kangaroo can do.

Tony Herrera raced around a dirt track in 12 seconds flat as he tried to match the land speed of the cheetah. Then he learned that the animal, with a top speed of almost 72 mph, could have done it in just two seconds.

“A cheetah’s been clocked at 71.6 mph,” said Leslie Perovich, executive director of Friends of the Santa Ana Zoo. “That doesn’t make any sense to the children. But when they can run it, that’s something they can understand.”

The adults at Saturday’s event also learned a thing or two. Seal Beach resident Dawn McCormick, who accompanied a group of Cub Scouts, discovered an animal park close to home.

“Usually you think of the Los Angeles or San Diego Zoo,” she said. “Here’s this nice little zoo within a 15-minute drive.”