Talk:Central Park Zoo
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This text needs corroboration before it's added to the article: In 1944, after a long night in the nightclubs zinc heiress Catherine Searles and her companions took a detour through the former zoo to see a polar bear. Rousing Soc, a 500-pound polar bear by rattling the bars of its cage, Miss Searles waved her handkerchief in his face; the bear pinned her arm against the bars and mauled it, severing it at the elbow. Miss Searles' stump was so badly mangled doctors had to amputate at the shoulder [1]--Wetman 08:36, 27 December 200
How about this:
FINED FOR ANNOYING BEARS; 3 in Brooklyn Reminded of Fate of Miss Searles, Who Is Gaining New York Times (1857-Current file). New York, N.Y.: Jul 19, 1944. pg. 21, 1 pgs Document types: article Abstract (Document Summary)
Magistrate James A. Blanchield, sitting in the Flatbush Court in Brooklyn yesterday, reminded a woman and two men, charged with heeding and annoying the bears in Prospect Park Zoo, of the fate of Catherine Searles, whose right arm was torn off by a polar bear in Central Park Zoo early Monday morning.
Wow, that seems like a pretty irrelevant piece of trivia about the Zoo. Do we really want to list 60-year old news about an obscure socialite that isn't even mentioned anywhere else on Wikipedia? (and the only thing I can find on Google is this same tidbit on gettingit.com). Isn't this supposed to be about the zoo? If we're going to list all maulings that have occurred, how about this one, which is only 24 years old? http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0CE7DD1E38F93BA1575AC0A964948260
[edit] Irrelevant text
I removed the following text from the page on Nov 16 2006:
New York's large gay community enjoyed the reports (Harpers Magazine February 7, 2004) that two male chinstrap penguins in the zoo have been homosexual lovers for years. They were identified when they took turns trying to hatch a rock, and when their keeper gave them a fertile egg to hatch "they did a great job" raising the chick [2].
For the record, I am emphatically not anti-gay, but if I were to make a list of the top 10 facts about the Central Park Zoo, or even a list of the top 100 facts, this wouldn't make the cut. It's an interesting news item (and a 2-year-old news item at that) and it might deserve to be someplace on Wikipedia, but this isn't the place. Better places would be a discussion of penguins, sexuality, or maybe animal sexuality. Maybe there's even an article on animal sexuality as observed in zoos. But, having this paragraph in the article on a zoo seems to me to violate neutrality in that people could easily think that the only reason for it being cited more prominently than hundreds of other potential facts about the zoo is to promote homosexuality.
In contrast, I think the movie reference, while not highly relevant either, is ok because the text is essentially a cross-reference. If you go to the Madagascar article, it cross-references back.
Also removed this external link
* Harper's Magazine, February 7, 2004: chinstrap penguin pairing
Somebody with more knowledge of the sexuality and/or animal behavior/sexuality sections of Wikipedia should find a spot for this.
[edit] Undocumented "pygmy"
The following, with an external link that doesn't work, would surely have appeared in one of several books on the history of Central Park in my cases: "The Cental Park Zoo once housed an African Human (Pygmy) [3]." If this can be sourced, it should go back into the article. --Wetman 08:54, 27 April 2007 (UTC)
[edit] www.centralpark.com
www.centralpark.com is one of several websites dedicated to Central Park. Someone is passing from page to page, carefully deleting this link. Rather than get involved in some rixe over this, I'm leaving it deleted. Before someone was inclined to delete it, without a word to anyone, as "spam", it should have been carefully looked at. --Wetman (talk) 18:47, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
