Bucket list birthday breakfast

Hitting the big five-oh, and Cathy had a great idea of how I could celebrate it in style, with rhinos!

Card made by Cathy

And so it was that early on my birthday we were at West Midlands Safari Park meeting the Asian rhinos and feeding them breakfast. I wasn't sure how close we would be allowed to get to the rhinos. (Petting a rhino has been on my bucket list for ages.) Turns out, we got close enough to get slobbered on as we fed them cabbage and celery starters. 

We met three adult rhinos and a baby' (less than a year old). The baby was adorable although his mum would push him out of the way to get to the cabbage. Rhino mums don't indulge their kids! Got to be tough to be a rhino. 

Asian rhinos have prehensile lips, which means they can grip things like door bolts, so extra security is needed on their pens. The lips are very flexible and they caress your hands while you feed them. They are very rubbery and warm, and I felt perfectly safe letting them engulf my hand to take the cabbage. 

However, while it's perfectly fine to put your hand into the mouth of a female rhino, the males have knife-like incisors in their mouths so it's advisable to just chuck the cabbage in from a safe distance. In the wild, male rhinos use their incisors for scrapping with each other over who gets to make it with the lady rhinos, and given they can do some damage to armoured rhino hide, they would make short work of a human hand if they accidentally bit you. 

For the main course of their breakfast the rhinos have a mix of different kinds of yummy pellets, mixed in with powder that simulates the dust that rhinos naturally consume while feeding in the wild. The dust helps them poop properly. Given how much rhinos can poop in an average day, it helps to make sure the poop is as solid and dry as possible. 

After breakfast was over, we bade goodbye to the rhinos. We then went on the Safari Drive, where we saw some more rhinos, and then looked at some of the other animals in the park. I enjoyed the sealion show and the nocturnal house with free-flying bats. But it's hard for any other animals to compete with the experience of being snuffled by friendly rhinos.