Close to 100 squirming, giggling children packed into the meeting room Monday at the Watonga Public Library. Alana, an employee of Extreme Animals, is fully at ease with the kids and the crowded room. She laughs and kids with the kids, waiting the last few minutes for the tardies to get in place seated on the floor in rows.
She begins the show, but youngsters continue to straggle in until it is full to capacity and then some. But it is all in good fun. The first animal out is a largeish gray snake, a marble python, Alana says. Her name is Hazel, about 5 ½ feet long. She is considered largeish because some of her family grow to several hundred pounds and many feet longer than Hazel. Her favorite food is rats.
Some of the children want to squeal and act up about the snake, but Alana lets them know it’s ok not to want to touch her. If that’s the case, they simply put their hands behind their backs, no harm, no foul. Hazel doesn’t seem to mind. After a brief chat about how snakes can help the environment by eating pesky rats, mice and other rodents, Hazel gets tucked back into her crate under a clothdraped table and out comes a deep gray ball of fluff.
This is Jazmine, a chinchilla. Alana explains chinchillas are endangered in the wild because they were hunted for expensive coats. Of course, today chinchilla fur for commercial use is almost entirely farm raised, but that has no impact on the splash Jaz is making.
Her incredibly soft fur makes her agreeable to everyone to touch, and her cute little ears twitch like she is trying to tune in Radio Free Europe. Chinchillas eat grass, hay, leaves and twigs. Alana says their superpower is the ability to spread plants by eating them and then leaving the seeds in their scat.
Those two little buddies are followed by an albino hedgehog, armadillo and a kanga-roo.
The children, although still squirmy, sit and listen and learn, with kids of every age and from every culture in town