Essay Questions

What is the relationship between beloved FunJungle mascot Henry the Hippo and an unloved poop-tossing hippo named Brutus?

The relationship between these two is that they are actually one and the same. Before Henry became the beloved mascot of FunJungle he was a problem hippo named Brutus who couldn’t find a zoo willing to put up with him for the long term. Brutus had already become a behavioral headache for four zoos before finding landing at FunJungle. In addition to his penchant for lodging poop toward visitors like a stinky missile, he also had a habit of biting his keepers bad enough to warrant speeding ambulances to the hospital. Upon arriving at FunJungle under rather than less honest circumstances on the part of the latest zoo fed up with dealing with him, he was rechristened Henry and became the focal point of marketing for the enterprise.

What is peritonitis and why is it significant to the story?

Peritonitis is the technical medical term for the interior of the abdomen suffering inflammation. Among the most common causes of this condition include an appendix which has burst, a stomach ulcer, several digestive problems reaching a critical stage and infections traveling from other organs that find their way into the stomach. Less common but with an equal potential is a traumatic injury to the abdomen involving a sharp implement such as, for instance, a knife wound. The condition is pertinent to the story because FunJungle’s head vet determines peritonitis to be the cause of Henry the hippo’s death. The mystery that is thus pursued by the protagonist and his associates is not what the hippo died of but rather how is it possible that he could have died from such an unlikely cause since the doctor also concludes that in order for Henry to have suffered such a demise it would have had to be intentional on the part of somebody. In other words, peritonitis is not just the cause of death, but the means of murder.

In this novel ALF does not stand for “alien life form” but rather what activist organization that is briefly—and wrongly—blamed for Henry’s death?

ALF neither describes a species from another world nor is a nickname for a member of that species, but rather stands for the Animal Liberation Front. Much like Greenpeace, the Animal Liberation Front is a controversial group not because not so much because of what they believe in—that animals shouldn’t be imprisoned on zoos—but rather the actions the are accused of taking in order to push awareness of their platform. However, since the management of FunJungle claims to have conducted an investigation which pins the blame for Henry’s death on ALF with not genuine evidence, the true nature of the organization remains a bit muddled for much of the narrative. Further complicating involvement of ALF in the story is that the daughter of the vet who determined the hippo’s unlikely cause of death is a member of the group and the doctor was being blackmailed in order to keep this information from becoming public.