A zoo in China tried — and failed — to pull one over on its visitors by trying to pass off a Tibetan mastiff as an “African lion.” They could have gotten away with it if only the dog had started roaring instead of barking.
The People’s Park of Luohe in the Henan province put an employee’s fluffy dog into the cage marked “African lion” because the lion had been shipped to a breeding facility, Beijing Youth Daily reports, via FoxNews.com.
A mother was pointing out different species of animals to her son when she realized that the “lion” was actually making the sound a dog makes.
But the mastiff wasn’t the only pet the zoo tried to pass off as wildlife. They also caged “two coypu rodents in a snake’s cage, a white fox in a leopard’s den, and another dog in a wolf pen.”
“The zoo is absolutely cheating us,” a visitor told the Chinese paper. “They are trying to disguise the dogs as lions.”
People probably wouldn’t have been so mad about the whole thing had the zoo just marked the cage Tibetan mastiff, because those dogs are perhaps even more adorable than lions.