'Ambassadors' give us reasons to care
His eyes got bright and he craned his neck hard to see just what these strange creatures were.
And periodically, he'd scamper back for a reassuring touch from one of his trainers.
The toys were obviously something he perceived as threatening.
"It's the big eyes," said Linda Henry, one of the aviculturists, or trainers, who look after Pete, traveling with the "Shamu's Worlds of Discovery Tour" from Sea World, which came to Orem on Wednesday. "He has no point of reference for an Elmo. The big eyes (on the dolls) have him a little worried. He sees them as fearsome."
Henry had to keep asking the children to hold their Elmo dolls down where Pete couldn't see them.
Pete is a warm-weather penguin from the coast of Chile. He's just under a year old and on his maiden voyage with the traveling tour.
He's part of a collection of interesting creatures known as the "Animal Ambassadors," including Simon the alligator, a lemur, a frog, Rock the African spurred-desert tortoise, a kookaburra and a cuscus possum, that are shown up close and personally to children and adults in dozens of locations in four states over six weeks.
Pete is also appealing, and that's good because the point of the tour is to get people to care.
"You won't try to preserve what you don't love," said Henry. "He's speaking for the animals who can't speak for themselves so that when you have a choice (whether to recycle that bottle or just throw it away), you'll think of Pete."
"We've done this for the past six years," said Booker T. Crenshaw Jr., Sea World's public relations representative. "One of the best responses we get is in Utah."
At the Orem First Family Loan Center, several hundred children and their parents and grandparents sat in the sun on chairs and on the asphalt to see the animals.
They cooed to get the kookaburra to sing and timidly touched Simon and Rock.
Henry said it's critical that people recognize the threats mankind has created for Arctic creatures and sea animals as well as Bengal tigers, mountain gorillas, puffins, marine turtles and bats.
Oiling is a huge problem for birds like the penguins as is global warming and garbage dumped into the oceans.
Keeping an Elmo out of sight is easy.
The rest of it, not so much.
To see what you can do, visit: seaworld.com
E-mail: haddoc@desnews.com
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