Spend any time at any zoo and you're bound to catch the scent of animal waste.
That's how it is at the Albuquerque's BioPark Zoo, but it's not the zoo animals that are stinking up the joint. It's the human visitors.
Park employees have recently been finding puddles of urine near the polar bear exhibit, and suspect that it's the results of kids who couldn’t quite make it to the bathroom, according to KOAT TV.
“It’s kind of gross, but as I say, I think it’s something that’ll happen in most heavily visited places,” zoo curator Bill Aragon told the station.
The zoo tries to combat animal piss with the help of an odor-eating "pee eliminator," but human urine is different, according to BioPark Director Rick Janser.
“Animal smells we can take care of pretty well,” Janser told the Albuquerque Journal. “It’s the human ones, however, you don’t expect to show up.”
The pee scandal is pissing off a lot of Albuquerque residents. The Albuquerque Journal felt so strongly about the problem that it wrote a scathing editorial:
Albuquerque’s BioPark is a multimillion-dollar public investment that has become the No. 1 tourist destination in the state. And while it is home to species that mark their territories, it’s a sad comment that some human visitors are among them.
The zoo is power-washed twice a month, but now that word about the excessive urine smell has been leaked, zookeepers and other staffers are trying to sniff out other unwanted deposits left by human visitors and clean them up in a timely manner.
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