Wait, this is the nation we are terrified it snatching U.S. influence abroad?

Once again, a Chinese zoo,the Zibo City amusement park in Shandong province this time, has been exposed as trying to deceive visitors by disguising a common animal as a more exotic one. China’s state-run Global Times confirmed that the zoo had painted donkeys with black and white stripes to make them appear to be zebras…and the disguise was not very well executed either, as the photo above suggests. After initially denying what was laughably obvious, the zoo’s representatives said that the paint job was a “marketing strategy,” and that the park’s “owner did it just for fun.”

Sure. What a great marketing strategy! “See? We think the Chinese public is made up of morons, and your job is to guess which of our animals aren’t what the signs say they are!” [See: Rationalization #55. The Joke Excuse, or “I was only kidding!”]

This is a habit of Chinese zoos; it isn’t just this one. Two week ago, the Qinhu Bay Forest Animal Kingdom had to admit that what they were exhibiting as a tiger cub was really a painted Chow Chow.

Wow! That sure would have fooled me!

This zoo also claimed that dying the dogs had just been “a gimmick,” then tried to pander to PETA, or something, by emphasizing that all the dogs had been dyed professionally and there was no risk to their health. Maybe, but the poor dogs’ mental health was definitely at risk, as they wandered around the “tiger cage” thinking, “Oh, god, this is so humiliating…”

Back in September of last year, an EA post discussed earlier incidents in which zoos disguised dogs to make them look—kind of—like pandas…

and lions…

(That’s a Tibetan Mastiff above.)

I wrote then in part,

“I believe the Chinese zoo episodes have greater significance than their obvious silliness. It is evidence of how thoroughly Mao’s cultural revolution and the grotesquely warped Bizarro World ethics they required have obliterated Chinese ethics alarms throughout the culture. This is a nation that first and foremost, as no respect for its own people, and is prone to treating them like morons. Second, it is a nation that breeds managers, leaders and persons of authority who think cheating, lying and achieving objectives by any means possible is the way to succeed. Finally, China has a society, culture and government that cannot be trusted, and is unlikely ever to be trustworthy. Not because its zoos try to deceive its visitors, but because only in a sick and devastated culture would any public zoo even try such a thing…”

As a Chinese dissident wisely observed during the Wuhan virus crisis, “Don’t trust China. China is asshole.” I am worried about the culture of corruption seeping in to the United States, but I can safely say that we will never reach the point where zoos think so little of the American public that they would try painting donkeys and dogs and think they could get away with it.

On the other hand, we just went through four years of a Presidential administration that tried to make the American public believe that a demented old man was really making all the decisions and was “sharp as a tack,” and no news media organizations exposed the fraud.

I think that’s a little more serious than painting donkeys and dogs.