6 Times Family Entertainment Went Horrifically Wrong

6 Zoo Director Calls Baboon "Cocksucker" On Live TV

It can't be easy running a zoo; after all, there's the animal-rights crowd, the kids that'd rather spend their day Snapfacechatindering than looking at animals that won't exist in a few decades, and the depressing fact that you aren't allowed to ride a sled pulled by lions around the park while wearing a shirt reading "Bungle in the Jungle." Also, the monkeys. They're just the worst. So, what happens when you combine stress, monkeys, and the pressures of live television? Gold.

During what was originally envisioned as just another early morning fluff piece, viewers of the lazily named Breakfast Television tuned in to watch a baboon-like creature, Michael Hackenberger, guiding an actual baboon through a series of tricks. One of these involved the monkey riding a pony. Cute, right? No, not really, because halfway through the skit, the baboon jumped down from the pony because it's a goddamn monkey ... only to be called a "cocksucker" and told to "get back up."

Shockingly, this did not sit well with viewers.

Alongside the usual social media onslaught, Breakfast Television cut all ties with Bowmanville Zoo. Hackenberger, who is also the freakin' director of the zoo, later apologized for his outburst, saying that he loves his animals very much and this was all a moment of "exasperation." Incidentally, this is the second result on Google for "Bowmanville Zoo":

We're not saying that you're a liar, Michael. We're just saying that your zoo has a pretty dickish way of showing that animal love. Speaking of which ...

5 Coney Island's Compulsive Masturbating Walrus Attraction

As 40 percent of all images on the Internet can attest, there's nothing cuter than an animal who thinks that it's people. In keeping with the other 60 percent of the Internet, here's a walrus furiously masturbating:

"We quit." -Cracked GIF department

Holy shit, look at him go! We're shocked his flippers haven't burst into flames -- though that would do nothing to stop him, since it turns out that walruses are extremely flexible. Yeah, you know where this is going.

That's why it's hotter, Under the water, Ya we in luck here, Down in the muck here, Under the sea

This isn't just some weird fetish we've taken up, by the by. That's Ayveq, a beloved walrus from Coney Island Aquarium who, let's face it, spent most of his time living the dream: jackin' it all day to the delight of a captive audience. If you're at work or, for some inexplicable reason, don't want to watch a video of a walrus pummeling his baby hose, picture a seal wrestling a chair leg from the clutches of a flappy-handed Cthulhu. The weirdest part is that he'd never even ridden the subway, so we can only imagine where he picked up all these advanced moves.

Unfortunately, you can't go see Ayveq "perform" anymore. He passed away several years ago, presumably from exhaustion. However, before he departed, Ayveq stopped hammering his sausage long enough to have a son, although tragically the pup died before we could learn whether or not he would've continued his father's life's work of making everyone else's family trips even more awkward.

4 Bear And Monkey Bike Race Ends With The Bear (Nearly) Eating The Monkey

You know what's never a bad idea? Getting animals to compete in cycling events. That said, the sport did suffer a slight setback in 2013, when the Shanghai Wild Animal Park held a cycling event between a bear and a monkey:

The bear was tasked with chasing the monkey, while the monkey's role was simply to pedal his bicycle like there was a fucking bear chasing him. However, the monkey took one corner too sharply and fell from his bike ... at which point the bear decided it was time to abandon all ceremony and just eat the monkey.

In the full video, you can see the trainers separate the bear from the body of the monkey, which looks like little more than a battered rug at that point. Fortunately, the monkey survived and the pair continued their five-year partnership, becoming the sporting world's most inspiring/disturbing story of reconciliation since Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson.

3 Copenhagen Zoo Shoots Giraffe And Feeds Its Body To Lions ... In Front Of An Audience

In 2014, Copenhagen Zoo sent shockwaves around the world after it was revealed that they'd euthanized a healthy giraffe, Marius, in the name of preserving the species. Dumb, yes. Also, kinda not; zoos can afford to raise only a certain number of animals, and they need as much genetic variety as possible. It just so happened that Marius had none. Conformity kills, kids.

Unfortunately, where this might have otherwise been a (harsh) lesson in the circle of life, the zoo decided to crank it up a notch and put on a display that appealed to fans of both The Lion King and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

After being euthanized, the giraffe was taken outside and autopsied before an audience of children and adults alike, presumably to offer the parents some catharsis after being forced to sit through Madagascar three dozen times. After this, Marius' corpse was dismembered and fed to the zoo's carnivores because, zoo officials said, "We would never throw away 200 kilograms of meat."

That said, we can't fault the zoo for killing the giraffe; they could never have released it back into the wild because it'd been raised in a zoo, and transferring it to another zoo might have resulted in inbreeding. Also, the zoo reported that the crowd was "very enthusiastic" and asked "good questions," which must have been a bummer for the supervillain who planned this whole thing.

Oh, and guess what happened to those lions a couple of weeks later? Go on, guess.

Man. Zoos are really good at killing animals.

2 Old-Timey Zoo Director Throws A Bunch Of Different Bears Into The Same Enclosure; Bloodbath Ensues

Speaking of which, have you ever visited a zoo and wondered why all the different types of snakes aren't in the same tank? Or maybe the deer? After all, barring some cosmetic changes and an extra fang here and there, they're all pretty much the same. Isn't there a law about how hundreds of monkeys, when crammed into one gigantic pen, will eventually start acting out sitcoms? We digress, but the reason zoos don't throw animals together like that is because it's a lunatic idea that is destined to fail. Fortunately for this article, this universal truth was lost on one man: Edmund Heller. After being appointed as the director of Washington Park Zoo in Milwaukee, Heller devised an experiment: placing the zoo's collection of black bears, grizzly bears, polar bears, and wolves (because, eh, close enough) into the same enclosure and watching what happened.

For the first three years, there was uninterrupted peace. In 1932, however, racial tensions finally exploded, and one of the black bears was violently drowned and eaten by the polar bears. Then it happened again. And again. In each instance, it was the same method: A black bear would either tumble or be pushed into the water and, almost immediately, a gang of polar bears would pile on and drown the poor bastard. And then eat the poor bastard. In front of everyone at the zoo. If you can't visualize this, by the way, here's a hilariously cute rendering of one incident.

When asked to explain why the polar bears were killing their black cousins, Heller wrote the deaths off as nothing more than playful accidents. His solution? Do absolutely nothing at all and hope the black bears learn to stop hanging out around the pool. Even after the black bears were removed from the enclosure, the polar posse would still maul black bear cubs whenever they so much as peeked through the bars of their cages ... and the zoo's reaction continued to essentially be, "Oh, those rascally bears and their bear games."

1 The Hilarious(ly Sad) Career Of Victor The Wrestling Bear

Speaking of bear games, how much money would it take to get you to wrestle a bear? Would the prize have to be child-sized? Adult-sized? The Burj Khalifa of money piles? It might shock you to learn that during the 1970s, people were so burned out by gas shortages and Vietnam that they'd willingly volunteer for bear fights. Enter Victor the Wrestling Bear.

An Alaskan brown bear, Victor was the wonder of the tundra, the lord of the forest, and a wacky diversion in the ring. With a fight record incomparable to any professional wrestler -- estimates range from anywhere between 2,000 and 50,000 wins, because after a certain number of bear fights you stop keeping track -- he fought volunteers in venues ranging from sports events to country fairs and can go down in history as the only living thing to (reportedly) kick Clint Eastwood's ass. Also included: the asses of Lee Marvin, Roddy Piper, Jim LeClair, and Chuck "Rocky Balboa" Wepner. And when he wasn't mauling drunken soccer moms or celebrities, he'd fight his trainer/manager, Tuffy Truesdell. His prize? Coke. We'll let your imagination run wild thinking about what type.

He may be an odd curiosity now, but in the '60s and '70s Victor was actually a minor celebrity, appearing on Johnny Carson's show, doing a movie with Eastwood, and being briefly involved with Cybill Shepherd .

However, by the 1980s the attitude toward bear wrestling began changing, mainly because of the whole "it's actually torture to them" thing -- Victor was heavily sedated and muzzled for each fight, as well as declawed and defanged. But, hey, at least his exit from the ring spared him from the ignoble fate of state fairs and local banquet halls afforded to most aging pro wrestlers. Although we would love to see him in a direct-to-DVD movie with Stone Cold Steve Austin.

Adam would like to thank Anita Serwacki and Cyriaque Lamar for inspiring this article, an awesome lunch, and teaching him more than he ever wanted to know about walrus self-pleasure. He can be contacted via email at adamwearscracked@gmail.com.

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