Word: moat
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Call it a natural disaster. The San Diego Zoo spent $3.5 million to build a designer forest that would house five adolescent Malayan sun bears. The zookeepers planted some trees, dug a moat, launched a waterfall, even hooked up a fiber-glass tree with an electric honey dispenser. As company for their wards, they invited lion-tailed macaques, yellow-breasted laughing thrushes, orange-bellied fruit doves and Indian pigmy geese...
When the lush exhibit opened this summer, zoogoers loved it. So did the bears. They shredded the trees, rolled up the sod, plugged the moat -- and then one attempted a fast break over the wall. Spectators went scrambling for a zookeeper, who propped up a plywood barrier while another clanged some pots and pans to intimidate the beasts and herd them into a locked enclosure...
...computerized irrigation system. A huge banyan tree has heating coils in its roots to encourage the python to uncoil near the viewing glass. Not far away, an agile cliff-springer mountain goat is contained on the assumption that it will not jump eight feet to a ledge on the moat's far side that is constructed at a precise 30 degrees angle. "But," admits architect David Rice, "nobody has told the cliff springer that...
Whenever the military moves to shutter a base, the member of Congress in whose district it is located rises in righteous indignation. Given the you- scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours philosophy that reigns on Capitol Hill, even such an anachronism as Virginia's moat-encircled Fort Monroe -- built for the War of 1812 -- has been spared, although it costs $186 million a year and serves no useful military purpose...
Living in the Yard as a freshman, one is like an innocent young princess, who since birth has been locked in a granite tower surrounded by a black and murky moat filled with starving, rabid mutant crocodiles. Since she never leaves, she has absolutely no idea how dangerous it can be. On the rare occasions when I crossed over to the Coop, I simply waited for the light to change. At first, it did strike me as strange that the cars never stopped, but I somehow whistled my way through that carefree year, my illusions intact...