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Tag: Zookeeper

  • Giraffe Kiss Goodbye With Zoo Keeper Goes Viral

    A dying man’s wish to see the animals he loved and worked with one last time took an unexpected and touching turn, one that is melting hearts across the internet.

    The former maintenance worker is known to many at the zoo as simply Mario. For about 25 years, he faithful cleaned the giraffe enclosure at the Rotterdam Zoo in the Netherlands.

    The mentally-disabled man had spent most of his adult life with his animal friends, but unfortunately he recently was diagnosed with terminal cancer. As the condition weakened him, Mario found himself unable to be near the animals he cared so much about.

    Mario was fortunate enough to be granted a wish by the Ambulance Wish Foundation, described as a Make-A-Wish Foundation for all ages.

    The agency gives terminally ill persons a chance to be driven to the location of their choice via ambulance. Individuals often elect to either see a favorite place one last time or a sight they’ve never seen before.

    In the case of Mario, when given this unique opportunity by the Ambulance Wish Foundation, there was only one place he wanted to go—to see his beloved giraffes one last time.

    When Mario was rolled into the giraffe enclosure on a stretcher, it was likely enough to be able to see his four-legged friends. However, in a surprising twist, one of the giraffes approached him. The giraffe leaned in through the opening and greeted Mario with a “kiss”.

    It was almost as if the animal was trying to thank Mario for his years of dedicated work and say goodbye.

    Kees Veldboer, the founder of the Ambulance Wish Foundation, spoke to Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad about the encounter, saying that the “giraffes recognized him” and he believed they knew that his health “wasn’t going well”.

    Mario was described as “beaming” over the encounter, which is hardly surprising given how touched total strangers are by photographs of the special moment.

    Images of the “goodbye kiss” have quickly gone viral, ensuring that Mario and the heart-warming farewell will be remembered for a very long time.

    Image via YouTube

  • Elephant Kills Zookeeper In Missouri

    Elephant Kills Zookeeper In Missouri

    An elephant has reportedly showed its aggression and killed the zookeeper that was working with her, in a zoo in Missouri. Patience, an elephant that has a history of aggression toward handlers, attacked and crushed her keeper on Friday morning. The keeper was a veteran at the zoo, and died in an unavoidable incident, when Patience decided to charge at him and crushed him to death. The shocking event happened in a matter of seconds.

    John Phillip Bradford was the keeper working with the group of elephants at the time, and as the manager of the elephants at Dickerson Park Zoo in Springfield, Missouri, when Patience charged at him, for an unknown reason. Other zookeepers working with Bradford quickly worked to pull the elephant away from him, whose actions were consistent with zoo policies, stated Cora Scott, a spokeswoman for the city, which runs the zoo. Scott also reported that Patience had been showing actions that were “hesitant and submissive” since the death of the herd’s matriarch, who died on October 4th, after suffering from kidney disease.

    The zoo officials have said that the elephant will not be punished for the incident. Working with wild animals of any kind can always be aa challenge, and especially with a big animal like an elephent, the danger is always there. In fact, according to a report that Time Magazine put out in 2007, more than 500 people die from elephant attacks worldwide each year. This is not the only incident in elephant related aggression in zoos that has occurred recently, following an attack by a mother to her newborn baby at a zoo in China in September.

    Bradford was 62 years old, and attacked by an older elephant, 41 years of age. Patience is an Asian elephant who has been at the zoo since 1990. He had worked at the zoo for 30 years, and the news of his death came as a huge shock to all of his colleagues, after such a long career there. The Chicago Tribune mentions that since 1984, 13 people have been injured in incidents involving elephants at zoos and other facilities nationwide, 10 of them fatally. However, this is the first incident that has involved the Dickerson Park Zoo.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpY5sJh40RY

    Image via Youtube

  • Baby Elephant Cries After Being Rejected By Mother

    A baby elephant was recently attacked and abandoned by his own mother at a zoo in China, causing him to cry for hours. Who knew that was even possible? No one is able to tell why, but it appears that the mother was trying to kill her baby, and the zookeepers were forced to keep it away from its mother.

    In this case, it is good that the elephants were in the safety of a zoo, because if they were in the wild, who knows what would have happened to the baby elephant. Several pictures were taken showing tears streaming down from his eyes and down his face.

    The elephant’s name is Little Zhuangzhuang and he seems to be doing much better now. It was originally thought that what the mother did was an accident, which would be the hope if something like this happens shortly after a baby’s birth. They were unfortunately wrong and figured out this sad fact after cleaning up Little Zhuangzhuang and treating his injuries, before returning him to his mother. She was having none of this, and continued to stomp on him, injuring the elephant further, says the NY Daily News. The mother refused to comfort her baby in a surprising act, which is scary to see. The keepers were forced to step in once more and permanently remove the baby from his mother.

    There were a number of pictures taken of the elephant as it continued to cry, after being abused by its mother. He was stepped on just after being born at the Shendiaoshan Wild Animal Nature Reserve in Rongcheng, China. He was recently adopted by an employee of the nature reserve and is doing better now.

    The University of California, Santa Barbara has been studying the question of whether elephants can actually cry and that it seems to depend on what definition we are using for crying. The main part of their finding involves whether or not elephants are able to express emotions and with this instance especially, it appears that they can. According to The Huffington Post, elephants are able to express joy when playing and greeting others by trumpeting and flapping their ears. They have also been known to mourn the dead by touching the bones or circling the body.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-PmeDeaBZU

    What a tragedy, let’s hope something like this does not happen again.

    Image via Youtube

  • Netflix Introduces Exhibitor, A Supervisor System For ZooKeeper

    It was announced last week that Netflix would be open sourcing its “monkeys” so people could get a look at how they handle their cloud infrastructure. It’s invaluable information considering that Netflix is one of the major companies to do a great deal of their business from the cloud. Keeping up with the animal motif, the company’s coordination service is called ZooKeeper and it’s going open source.

    A part of ZooKeeper, Curator, had already gone open source. It was a client library for ZooKeeper, but Netflix saw a need for a supervisor service “that runs alongside ZooKeeper server instances.” This led to the creation of Exhibitor and it’s going open source from the start.

    Netflix details the arduous effort that goes into currently managing ZooKeeper. A lot of it has to do with the fact that developers have to manually configure a ZooKeeper ensemble. This requires an ensemble to be “hard coded into a configuration file that must be identical on each ZooKeeper instance.”

    That’s where Exhibitor comes in as a service that should make developer’s lives easier when using ZooKeeper. Here’s the list of features that you can expect when using Exhibitor:

    Instance Monitoring: Each Exhibitor instance monitors the ZooKeeper server running on the same server. If ZooKeeper is not running (due to crash, etc.), Exhibitor will rewrite the zoo.cfg file and restart it.

    Log Cleanup: In versions prior to ZooKeeper 3.4.x log file maintenance is necessary. Exhibitor will periodically do this maintenance.

    Backup/Restore: Exhibitor can periodically backup the ZooKeeper transaction files. Once backed up, you can index any of these transaction files. Once indexed, you can search for individual transactions and “replay” them to restore a given ZNode to ZooKeeper.

    Cluster-wide Configuration: Exhibitor attempts to present a single console for your entire ZooKeeper ensemble. Configuration changes made in Exhibitor will be applied to the entire ensemble.

    Rolling Ensemble Changes: Exhibitor can update the servers in the ensemble in a rolling fashion so that the ZooKeeper ensemble can stay up and in quorum while the changes are being made.

    Visualizer: Exhibitor provides a graphical tree view of the ZooKeeper ZNode hierarchy.

    Curator Integration: Exhibitor and Curator (Cur/Ex!) can be configured to work together so that Curator instances are updated for changes in the ensemble.

    Rich REST API: Exhibitor exposes a REST API for programmatic integration.

    There are two versions of Exhibitor available to developers. You can either get the Standalone or Core version of the application. Standalone is a pre-configured Jetty-based self-contained application. Core is more flexible as it can be built into an existing application or one can build an extended application around it.

    If you want to get into the nitty gritty of the code, Netflix has already posted the source code for Exhibitor on Github. Get cracking on some new applications using the Core version of Exhibitor.

  • Does Viral Marketing Include TV Show Editing?

    As the explosion of social networking completes itself — hey, Mark Zuckerberg agrees — viral marketing is a very real aspect of today’s world. The best examples of successful viral marketing attempts normally comes from movies, with examples like The Dark Knight and Cloverfield come to mind. It should be noted that this kind of marketing is not limited to using Internet resources, but with the popularity of social media, it’s a natural fit.

    If you watched any of the NBA Playoffs, you saw a massive marketing campaign for the upcoming Kevin James vehicle, Zookeeper. Ads and other related content were forced upon the basketball-viewing public because, apparently, the target audience for such schlock are people who watch sports. Never mind the fact that these ads should’ve been shown to children during viewings of Sponge-Bob, instead of NBA fans. The fact is, Zookeeper had a hefty marketing campaign, however misguided, but apparently, the product placement was not limited to Dallas/Miami basketball games.

    How does editing reruns of television shows that, in this case, were shown four years ago, to include promotional material for a 2011 movie sound? Does that sound savvy or ridicule-worthy? Thanks to an eagle-eyed Consumerist reader, it may be easier for you to answer that question. As the Consumerist revealed, the marketing arm that does the promotional work for Zookeeper decided that a 2007 episode of “How I Met Your Mother” was a great place to include such marketing materials.

    The edited image in question:

    Zookeeper Edit

    As you can see by the circled portion of the image, there sits a magazine advertising the upcoming James calamity film. Take a look at an unedited image, again, courtesy of the Consumerist:

    Zookeeper Unedit

    There seems to be something missing from the original image that’s all-of-a-sudden appearing in the reruns. In reference to viral marketing, is that too far? Is that overreaching and perhaps overvaluing the effectiveness of viral marketing? Much like the reaction at the Consumerist, doing something like this runs the risk of having your product mocked, but then again, this is a movie about a zookeeper who can apparently hear other animals talk. Doctor Dolittle copycats aside, does such creative editing increase your desire to see the Zookeeper or does something like this make you think even less of the upcoming movie?

    What’s next? Placing bumper sticker ads on for Super 8 on new copies of the Back to the Future DVD? Or maybe an inserted ad for the upcoming Captain America movie in M.A.S.H reruns?

    Lead image courtesy.