Animals are accustomed to being outdoors and dealing with even the most oppressive heat waves. Especially considering that some of them walk around all day and night wearing the equivalent of a winter coat on their backs, animals can teach us a lot about staying cool.
How do zoo animals deal with the heat? The Boston Globe inquires, and finds out that there’s a two-pronged approach that pretty much boils down to: Put cold stuff into your body, and avoid movement.
While a brutal heat wave hits the East Coast, the animals at various zoos in New England are being treated to frozen versions of their favorite foods and drinks. Birds peck at frozen apple juice treats, while lions chew on “bloodsicles,” chewing and slurping on hunks of frozen blood that are as big as five gallons. Among the other cool delicacies served up at zoos:
The pottos — small, nocturnal primates from west and central Africa — enjoyed a frozen banana. The cotton-top tamarins, small primates found in Colombia, munched on bugs and carrots in little ice cubes.
What does this mean to folks who don’t eat bugs or drink blood? In your own home, if you think just a little bit outside the cube, so to speak, you’ll realize there are plenty of fun (and cheap) ways to cool your family off and avoid dehydration. Most things that a child normally likes to eat, he or she will also like to eat frozen. A while back, we put a batch of chocolate chip cookies into the freezer mostly because we had so many they were going to go bad before we could eat them. But now with the heat wave upon us, the frozen cookies—which thaw out way quicker than you’d imagine in this heat—are a cool delight. Frozen mint Girl Scout cookies are classics in our house. Gnawing on a frozen apple or a frozen peach, my kids have discovered, can be quite wonderful as well. And we’ve been sucking on all sorts of frozen blenderized fruits and juice concoctions. Our kids enjoy these things even more when they’ve helped make them and decided what to mix and pour into each popsicle compartment. It’s like a cool, and deliciously cooling, mad scientist’s experiment.
Another thing we can all learn from animals: Take it easy. Zoo animals aren’t exactly known for exhibitions of energy, and they’re triply lethargic when it’s hot out. In this case, the animal is the Zen master you must watch and learn from. What animals do is as simple as it gets: They find some shade, ideally in a spot with a little breeze, and they stay put. Here’s one observation on the wisdom of animal laziness:
“You see people walking around in the sun,’’ [curator of mammals for Zoo New England John] Piazza said. “Animals have it right: Why waste the calories?’’
In other words: Chill out.