Ethan Meets a Rhino

We recently learned that the St. Louis Zoo does behind the scenes tours of their rhinos.  Ethan has been obsessed with rhinos since he was about 18 months old - when he received a stuffed rhino named "Bum Bum Rhino".  Once Ethan became old enough for this tour, we booked one for our annual summer outing to the STL zoo.  We even parked in the R for Rhino section of the parking lot!

Our tour was at 1:45 p.m., but Ethan didn't want to wait that long before seeing the rhinos.  Here he is posing with Bum Bum Rhino (yes, we brought him along to "meet his cousins").  We were able to walk the entire zoo before our rhino tour.  Even though it was a hot day, many of the animals (except the Big Cats) were very active.

Almost time for the tour!  We were given access to the rhino and hippo private areas.

Ethan exploring where the rhinos sleep at night and learning how they train the rhinos to successfully navigate their way through the gate.  The only safety tip that we were given was to not put our hand/arm between the rhino and the sides of the fence so that they do not get crushed - we were only allowed to put them straight out.

Rhino time!  The STL zoo has two rhinos - the female is Kati (that is the one we met) and the male is Ajabu. She had just woken up from a nap and was a bit slow to respond at first, but after she had been fed a few branches of leaves, she perked up!  Olivia learned just how strong Kati is when they got into a bit of a tug of war over the branch.

The big moment - petting the rhino!  Ethan says that the skin felt like "snake skin only wrinkly-er".  We were a bit surprised by how rough her skin was - we thought that it would feel softer and that we would feel more hair/fuzz on her.  But behind her ears was very soft, and she really liked to be petted there.  Ethan also learned to not hold out Bum Bum Rhino to "show" Kati since she attempted to eat him!  Luckily the zookeeper prevented that from happening.

Just look at that excitement on his face!  He was truly speechless by this experience.  It seemed to be a bit overwhelming for him since he was a bit shy about going around Kati.

This was a great experience for all of us!

We celebrated by taking a train ride selfie :)

To finish our rhino day, we walked down the the STL Zoo sculpture to see one more rhino.