You open your front door to see that someone dropped a baby on your doorstep. What would you do? You might think: ‘Oh my god, this must be some sort of harry potter baby! Quick, give it a wand!’
And I get that. Normally, I would think the same and would not think twice before immediately practicing my Hagrid’s “you´re a wizard harry” speech. But since I saw Disney’s Jungle book, I would think differently. Now, I would gather some jungle animals and let them raise the child. Because, why raise your child with magic and some dark arts stranger danger when you could raise it in a friendly animal family? I can only think of benefits! For example, your kid will always have a bodyguard. Isn´t that nice? And it will instantly be cool and be known as the animal whisperer. Also, it will always have friends around. Is your kid feeling lonely? Simply take him to a pet store.
After you have made the right decision to not call the child services but to perform your great big plan, you can start planning on how to gather all the jungle animals together for a reunion. How do you prepare yourself in case of such an occasion? Let’s do it with a tea party. Can’t go wrong there.
Before inviting those guests of you over, you have to act as if your house was about to be hit by a tsunami. Let’s say you want to invite a black panther like Bagheera, a sloth bear like Baloo, and an Indian elephant like Colonel Hathi. Stash your whole house with enough meat, bananas, insects, etc. for a whole week. Increase the temperature a bit, to about 21-25 °C, and you’re good to go. And don’t forget to remove any animal mounts from your living room. As you can imagine, this will give the wrong idea. Especially the Indian elephant will be offended, as it is an endangered animal.
Once you are fully prepared, you can welcome the guests. The bear might still fit through your door, but in order to let the elephant through, you might also need to call a destruction worker and ask for a wrecking ball machine to break open your walls. The elephant can namely become about 1.8 to 3.35 meters high (shoulder height). Of course, having the party outside is a better idea, but not all of us have that luxury, so we have make some sacrifices, right?
After the guests have seated themselves, make sure they feel right at home. Poor some tea while you show some PowerPoint slides with photos showing their natural habitat. A slide with grass and trees with a nearby pool for the elephant. A photo of the jungle with a lot of trees for the panther, and one with an abundant amount of food for the sloth bear.
Serve the tea with food from their habitat. Start with the elephant, since he can spend up to 19 hours a day eating. A wheelbarrow filled with grass should be fine. Give some fresh meat to the panther. Don’t mind seasoning. For the bear, 2 buckets filled with fruit with a honey dressing, together with that ant nest in front of your door. You know what, forget the tea. They don’t drink that. Heck, they can’t even hold a teacup. The bear has 7-8 cm long curved claws. It would be impressive if he could. Instead, he uses his claws to penetrate nest mounds. They also use their nose and mouth to blow dirt away and vacuum insects out of their nests.
A panther has some very nice claws too. It uses these to climb trees or to catch prey. In addition, it can use them to scrape trees to mark its territory. Not only males, also females do this to warn off other female panthers from their territory. Another way of marking is by rubbing their cheek against a tree trunk or something similar. So, if you see the animal rubbing its cheek against a tree outside of your house, this is not an act of love to Mother Nature. It probably just wants to have its territory to go international.
