03-21-2014, 04:56 PM
Giraffe Gives Dying Zoo Worker A Kiss Goodbye
What better way to celebrate the end of the week than with some pure, unadulterated sob-fuel? Witness Mario--just Mario--a 54-year-old man who spent most of his life working at Holland's Diergaarde Blijdorp zoo in Rotterdamn. Dying of terminal cancer, Mario requested that his hospital bed be wheeled into the giraffe enclosure. What happened next is...well, just look at the pictures.
Soon after Mario was brought into the enclosure, one giraffe approached to give him a kiss goodbye.
"These animals recognized him, and felt that [things aren't] going well with him," Kees Veldboer, founder of the Ambulance Wish Foundation told Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad. Veldboer's charity, which grants dying wishes to the terminally ill, transported Mario to the zoo.
"[It was] a very special moment. You saw him beaming."
Daily Mail reported that after meeting with the giraffes, Mario, who is mentally disabled, requested a moment to say goodbye to his colleagues at the zoo where he worked for most of his adult life.
All right, fine. The cynics out there might be saying that the giraffe wasn't really giving him a kiss, that it was only looking for food, or performing some kind of giraffe greeting behavior. To which we say, pah! This giraffe was giving his beloved companion a goodbye kiss. If there's a world where a giraffe kiss is not a giraffe kiss, that's not a world we want to live in.
http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2014/03/21/...d%3D456397
What better way to celebrate the end of the week than with some pure, unadulterated sob-fuel? Witness Mario--just Mario--a 54-year-old man who spent most of his life working at Holland's Diergaarde Blijdorp zoo in Rotterdamn. Dying of terminal cancer, Mario requested that his hospital bed be wheeled into the giraffe enclosure. What happened next is...well, just look at the pictures.
Soon after Mario was brought into the enclosure, one giraffe approached to give him a kiss goodbye.
"These animals recognized him, and felt that [things aren't] going well with him," Kees Veldboer, founder of the Ambulance Wish Foundation told Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad. Veldboer's charity, which grants dying wishes to the terminally ill, transported Mario to the zoo.
"[It was] a very special moment. You saw him beaming."
Daily Mail reported that after meeting with the giraffes, Mario, who is mentally disabled, requested a moment to say goodbye to his colleagues at the zoo where he worked for most of his adult life.
All right, fine. The cynics out there might be saying that the giraffe wasn't really giving him a kiss, that it was only looking for food, or performing some kind of giraffe greeting behavior. To which we say, pah! This giraffe was giving his beloved companion a goodbye kiss. If there's a world where a giraffe kiss is not a giraffe kiss, that's not a world we want to live in.
http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2014/03/21/...d%3D456397