The Bronx won't have the Arabian oryx to kick around any more

How bad is the economy? Even animals are getting fired. That's right, you're going to have to elbow a goddamn ibex out of the way so you can pick up your unemployment check. Deer on the dole. You know deer aren't getting any jobs. Who wants to see a deer when you can see a lion sleeping?

Layoffs in the city have spread from the piggy traders on Wall Street to the animals at the Bronx Zoo.

The institution is closing four exhibits and shipping hundreds of creatures to zoos and aquariums around the country, officials told the City Council Cultural Affairs Committee yesterday. Deer, bats, porcupines, foxes, lemurs, caimans and antelopes will be pink-slipped as part of the 114-year-old zoo's effort to cope with a $15 million budget shortfall.
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The Bronx Zoo -- the country's largest urban zoo, which 2.1 million people visited last year alone -- is shutting its World of Darkness, Rare Animal Range and exhibits of the Arabian oryx and blesbok, two types of antelope.
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The shuttered displays were chosen based on maintenance costs and popularity among visitors, zoo officials said.

One question: How high can the maintenance costs be on a blesbok? Actually, second question: What the fuck is a blesbok?

That's gotta hurt, not only do they fire you and ship you off to somewhere like the Cleveland Zoo, they rub it in by telling you that it was also because you're massively unpopular. Somehow I don't think many tigers are getting the brush off that the antelope and all it's boring, bizarrely named antelope brethren are getting. Only $1.7 million of this is the fault of Mayor Bloomberg, which isn't really his fault. He was told if they cut funding for the zoo, then it would cause them to get rid of all the "lemurs and night monkeys", which he took as racist code. As of press time there is no clue as to what color he thought lemurs were a racist analogue for.

Fare thee well blesbok, dik-dik, caicano, guanaco, cok-cok, Arabian oryx, penis-penis, and caiman. You will be missed. Good luck finding a job in this economy.