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Trivia Quizzes

Fake-or-Fact Friday: Giraffe Laughs Edition

August 29, 2014

Here are three very strange news reports involving giraffes. Two are real, but one is fake. Can you guess which one we made up? The answer is at the end of the post.

A.

Claiming that she “loves giraffes,” a California woman visiting the Madison Zoo in Wisconsin crawled into the facility’s giraffe enclosure. There, she encountered a relatively young and small giraffe—two years old and only 12 feet tall. The giraffe ate grass out of the woman’s hand, and then sweetly licked her face. Then, not so sweetly, it kicked her in the face. Adding injury to injury, the woman was fined $700 for trespassing.

B.

Wildlife Safari is a zoo in Oregon in which patrons drive through open areas where animals live, hoping for a close-up glimpse of nature, or even for an animal to approach their car. A family took their three-year-old son to the park specifically to see his favorite animal: giraffes. But by the time the family research the zoo, the boy was asleep, and he was still asleep when a giraffe approached the car and popped its head through the sunroof, from which it tenderly removed the boy from the car. Not buckled into his seat, the toddler was wearing giraffe-print pajamas with a giraffe-head hood pulled over his head. (He was safely recovered minutes later.)

C.

During the World Cup game between the USA and Ghana this summer, an American airline sent out a tweet when Clint Dempsey got a goal, pushing the score to USA 2, Ghana 1. The tweet showed a picture of a “2” superimposed over the Statue of Liberty (for the USA) and a “1” over a photo of a giraffe on a plain to represent Ghana. Here’s the thing: there are no giraffes in Ghana. After dozens of response pointing out the airliner’s ignorance of African and animals, somebody figured out that the giraffe photo was a stock image taken at an animal reserve in Kenya…3,000 miles away from Ghana.

Want more things that sound true…but aren’t? Then check out Uncle John’s Fake Facts. (Really!)