Kid Crazy
14" X 20" oil on canvas
Original art is available
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How can any creature be pawed, poked and groped all day long, and still have a pleasant, sweet disposition? Perhaps only a infant, who, until recently, had spent any number of months in constant contact in utero.
We’re at the Beacon Hill Petting Zoo today, in Victoria, BC. It’s a favourite hangout for us, especially in the spring when the year’s crop of baby animals is at its cutest.
There are a number of disco chickens, ducks and turkeys, too, and most with outrageously flamboyant plumage. Fun to look at, but not very friendly. Sweetie Pie Vietnamese pot-bellied pig is quite popular. The most appealing, by far, are the little goats. They prance around the pen butting heads, like they know why. While I’m shooting pictures, I spot this child giving poor Timothy the goatlet an extreme makeover with the grooming brush. There was simply no escaping that headlock.
Charlotte, my oldest daughter, age 14, is besieged by a gang of ravenous wheelchair-chewing thugs, with names like Tulip, Harold and Daisy. The chair is fascinating for them, as it’s a bit of the unusual in yet another day of relentless, well-intentioned, but usually clumsy grooming. They lick and bite as much of the cabling and pins and levers as they can before my daughter Sarah and my partner Lisa extract them, often hind legs first, since they like to get in underneath where it’s shady, and have a good chomp. And as one is retrieved, two more push in ... except for Tom, the little black one up top, who insists on conquering Charlotte’s lap as many times as he can.
The time to be here is 5:30 p.m. – closing time. That’s when the zoo staff lines us all up along the main pathway to form a human wall. When they open the double gates on the goat pen, the strangest, funniest little stampede you have ever seen comes bearing down on us, and we clap and cheer 40-some-odd goats along and around the bend and up into their barn for the night. Occasionally a particularly determined youngster gets through, but he or she never gets far. Many helping hands, now finished with grooming, make sure that every little Gruff gets safely home. Mark Heine
14" X 20" oil on canvas
Original art is available
Contact us
How can any creature be pawed, poked and groped all day long, and still have a pleasant, sweet disposition? Perhaps only a infant, who, until recently, had spent any number of months in constant contact in utero.
We’re at the Beacon Hill Petting Zoo today, in Victoria, BC. It’s a favourite hangout for us, especially in the spring when the year’s crop of baby animals is at its cutest.
There are a number of disco chickens, ducks and turkeys, too, and most with outrageously flamboyant plumage. Fun to look at, but not very friendly. Sweetie Pie Vietnamese pot-bellied pig is quite popular. The most appealing, by far, are the little goats. They prance around the pen butting heads, like they know why. While I’m shooting pictures, I spot this child giving poor Timothy the goatlet an extreme makeover with the grooming brush. There was simply no escaping that headlock.
Charlotte, my oldest daughter, age 14, is besieged by a gang of ravenous wheelchair-chewing thugs, with names like Tulip, Harold and Daisy. The chair is fascinating for them, as it’s a bit of the unusual in yet another day of relentless, well-intentioned, but usually clumsy grooming. They lick and bite as much of the cabling and pins and levers as they can before my daughter Sarah and my partner Lisa extract them, often hind legs first, since they like to get in underneath where it’s shady, and have a good chomp. And as one is retrieved, two more push in ... except for Tom, the little black one up top, who insists on conquering Charlotte’s lap as many times as he can.
The time to be here is 5:30 p.m. – closing time. That’s when the zoo staff lines us all up along the main pathway to form a human wall. When they open the double gates on the goat pen, the strangest, funniest little stampede you have ever seen comes bearing down on us, and we clap and cheer 40-some-odd goats along and around the bend and up into their barn for the night. Occasionally a particularly determined youngster gets through, but he or she never gets far. Many helping hands, now finished with grooming, make sure that every little Gruff gets safely home. Mark Heine
