The camel

We've sponsored a camel at London Zoo.

Like many zoos, London Zoo runs an animal adoption scheme. Full details can be found here, but basically you send them some money which they use to care for a particular animal and you get your name on a plaque next to the animal's cage.

I think that the idea was first mentioned in 1999 at one of our pub meetings. It was obvious from the start which animal we wanted to adopt. There was a slight hiccup when we discovered that it costs 1000 pounds to adopt a camel (llamas are far cheaper), but we decided that there was enough interest between us raise the money.

It's taken a bit longer than expected (partly due to the two people who were collecting the money disappearing off to Europe to live) but on August 6th 2000 - the second anniversary of our first meeting, we finally became proud adopted parents of our camel. The plaque should be up by the end of August.

In our adoption pack, we also got a load of free zoo tickets (so we can all go and see our camel) here is a picture of a camel (just in case we didn't know what one looks like)

We also have a certificate proving that we've done it.

We all feel very proud of our good works and would like to encourage other Perl Monger groups to do the same with their local zoos. It's very likely that other zoos run similar schemes.

Thanks to Robert Shiels, we've now renewed the camel sponsorship for another year, and now we have to raise the money to pay him back. We've also visited the camel.