Out of Africa Wildlife Park

We took a day off from baseball to go to the Out of Africa Wildlife Park in Fountain Hills. Their claim to fame is that they put unarmed humans into pens with supposedly wild, "untrained" cats to demonstrate the psychology of wild animals.

Our first show was the "Big Cat Show." It started with a 600-pound male tiger contentedly sucking on Prayeri's thumb, with his paw on her leg to say "stay here." They talked about instinctual behaviors and demonstrated how tigers will attack when they see an animal in distress (in this case, a guy on the other side of the chain link fence, which thankfully held up just fine against the powerful leap of a determined tiger).

Next, we got to see how the same 600-pound tiger working on a pork leg will react differently to approaching humans depending on whether or not the tiger thinks the human is interested in taking the pork away. In this picture, it's clear that he thought Dean was going after his lunch.

In the second show, "Tiger Splash," they had able-bodied assistants run around a pool with various toys trying to get the tigers to attack the toys and not the assistants. It was very impressive to see a tiger take a flying leap into a pool to kill a pink dinosaur (or a balloon-filled replica of the assistant).

We also saw Mariners Spring Training at Peoria and Sammy Sosa and The Cubs.