I guess this maybe falls into the “it’s a small world” category, but I was reading something the other day that reminded me of one of our experiences years ago. I won’t go into all the detail that finally led me to the thing that sparked my memory, but while looking for something else, I ran across an old article from March of 2020 that said the Singapore Zoo had announced that Suzie the Nile hippopotamus had died at the age of 44. The article indicated that this age was well past a hippo’s prime, as hippos in the wild typically live up to 40 years. Susie arrived at the Singapore Zoo in 1976 — four hears after the zoo opened.
We visited the Singapore Zoo in 1974 — although the zoo “opened” in 1972, it didn’t actually start operating until 1973. So the zoo had only been open about a year before we visited, but it already had quite a reputation. It seems that in an effort to make the zoo environment as “natural” as possible, the designers/builders over-achieved. Many of the animals were constantly “escaping” — even those in in areas with “bars.” They initially set the bars so far apart that animals like lions and tigers could just walk out between the bars.
One of the more famous “escapes” was Congo, a hippo that gained fame for hiding out in the local reservoir for 52 days. We were in Singapore during those 52 days. Every day or so, there’d be an article in the local newspaper about Congo being sighted in the reservoir. The hippo was the “talk of the town” there for a while.
The Singapore Zoo was first conceptualized in 1969. The Public Utilities Board decided to develop the land around Singapore’s reservoirs to public spaces. The land around the Upper Seletar Reservoir was set aside as land for a zoo. The zoo’s opening day was June 27, 1973. The Prime Minister when we were there, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, was concerned about the hippopotamus polluting the water, but at the time he seemed to be just about the only one concerned about that — everyone else was just following Congo’s adventures. When we left Singapore, Congo was still having a good time in the reservoir. I remember reading later that zookeepers finally lured Congo into a crate with bananas and sweet potatoes.
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