Jake's Travel Blog: Australia Zoo

My last day in Australia was spent at the Steve Irwin Zoo. I had a lot of fun checking out the different animals of Australia and other parts of the world. Most of the animals in the zoo were rescued or were born at the zoo, so I didn't feel bad for them for being taking out of the wild. It also looked like they were treated very well - the elephants were trained particularly well and moved around as requested by the zoo keepers without any hitting necessary - very unlike the way we saw elephants being treated in Thailand.

A very old & very big tortoise. Something like 120 years old I think.

I thought it looked a lot like a turtle and this raised the question of what's the difference...I found out that tortoises live only on land and turtles live both on land and in the water.

Sleeping koala. How cute. Dingo; just like the one that ate our food on Fraser Island. So what's the difference between a dingo & a wild dog? Not much, but there are a few small distinctions - apparently dingos always have a white tail, and they cannot bark. Brown snake. Don't want to run into these guys in the wild! Steve Irwin's "Crocoseum"

Can't remember what this is...

The elephant habitat, where I got to feed them. It was really funny feeling them suck the food from my hand with their trunk. I got to feed them about 5 times because there weren't nearly as many people there for the afternoon feeding.

The zoo is absolutely covered in Steve Irwin pictures. At first I thought it was exploiting him after his death, but then I realized the main goal of the zoo seemed to be to carry on Steve's lifelong goal of helping animals around the world. They showed a pretty powerful video of Steve speaking about his purpose for being on this planet.

The Tasmanian devil did not look like the one I knew of from my childhood...to be honest I was a bit disappointed to learn they look nothing like the guy in the cartoons.

There was a big open field where we could feed the kangaroos. There was also an area where they could go if they wanted to get away from the humans...but most of them were out to play so I was happy to see them voluntarily coming out to hang out with me and get some food.