Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales

A wallaby in disguise is the latest adversary from the animal kingdom for Chris...

Given how often I write about a certain rabbit in My Weekly, you’d think by now I’d be able to recognise one, wouldn’t you?

But no, on a recent family outing to Whipsnade Zoo, and after watching a herd of some sort of weird African deer not gliding majestically over the Savannah, but standing stock still in a rain-soaked field, I happened to notice a rabbit standing a few feet behind them. As I studied the rabbit, I noticed something not quite right about it.

“That’s a really big rabbit,” I suddenly exclaimed, causing my daughter Maya to spill hot chocolate down her front. “It can’t be a rabbit, surely, it must be a hare?” I continued. “No, no, it’s definitely a rabbit – an absolutely huge rabbit!”

An extremely irritated and chocolate-coated Maya wrenched the binoculars from my hands, a move which, considering I had them strapped around my neck at the time, had me hurtling sideways towards her.

Maya studied the rabbit for a few seconds, the top of my head trapped at a 45degree angle against her cheek, and finally gave out a huge exasperated sigh.

“It’s a wallaby! How on earth could you think a

How on earth could you think a wallaby was a rabbit?

wallaby was a rabbit?”

Indeed. Humiliated by a wallaby then, and believe it or not, not for the first time. I have history with wallabies (that’s a sentence you probably won’t hear often). My Whipsnade wallaby woes go back 40 years, in fact.

On a forced school trip to the zoo in 1976, a free range wallaby stole my bag. As I sat on a hill, about to eat lunch, the bouncing marsupial appeared from nowhere, grabbed my bag and hopped off downhill at top speed.

Quarter of an hour, it took me to get it back, running back and forth across a muddy field in front of 30 jeering classmates. I did finally recover it, but only because the vindictive animal finally decided to drop it into a pile of muck so copious I’m guessing the elephants had been out for a morning stroll.

Add to all that, a wallaby I tripped over in Coombe Martin, Devon a few years ago and it’s quite a picture, isn’t it? What was a wallaby even doing in a Devon Dinosaur theme park anyway? I was looking up at Brachiosaurs and the like, not down… at wallabies.

Another thing about that particular theme park that baffles me to this day, is why they felt the need to have their animatronic dinosaurs double as slightly unsavoury impromptu water features. Still rubbing my knees after my wallaby incident, I stopped to admire a magnificent Tyrannosaurus, and it spat straight in my face. What an all-round lovely day that was.

And the moral of this story? Always remember rabbits are better than wallabies, and never trust a dinosaur from Devon.

Well, any advice from me was never going to be particularly useful, was it?

Chris Pascoe is the author of A Cat Called Birmingham and You Can Take the Cat Out of Slough, and of Your Cat magazine’s column Confessions of a Cat Sitter.