Filthy, filthy animals

I'm not what you'd call a prude by any stretch of the imagination, but this seems just plain wrong:

Genevieve Chandler has been visiting the Lowry Park Zoo since she was a kid, but the tour she got the other night was definitely not the G-rated fare of her childhood. Among the things Chandler, 30, and her date learned on their "Wild at Heart" zoo tour: Male pigs have a unique corkscrew endowment and impressive, um, output; manatees have orgies and don't really care if their partners are male or female; and a male porcupine has only one four-hour window a year to mate _ very carefully, of course.

Valentine's Day is the time of year when zoos around the nation seek to woo a new adult audience with risque tours that couple champagne, chocolate-covered strawberries and candlelight dining with impressive facts about how animals do the wild thing.

Right. Because what could possibly be more romantic than learning about bisexual manatee orgies?

Tour guides in Tampa warned of possible manatee make-out sessions. But the giant mammals were content to munch on vegetation while the tour group ate a candlelight dinner in front of the zoo's massive aquarium windows.

"Manatees are not particular," Nelson said. "We have only males right now and they don't seem to care."

And people actually pay good money to eat a romantic candlelight dinner in front of that? Sometimes, I'm glad that I'll probably die alone.