Animal sex tours in NY

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Florida, Feb 14: Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo calls it the “Wild at Heart” tour. At New York’s Central Park Zoo, it’s “Jungle Love.” San Francisco offers “Woo at the Zoo,” and in Boise, Idaho, it’s possible to enjoy “Wild Love at the Zoo.”

When Valentine’s Day rolls around, zoos around the US have become an unlikely locale for adult-oriented entertainment with risque tours that couple champagne, chocolate-covered strawberries and candlelight dining with impressive facts about how animals mate.

Genevieve Chandler, 30, has been visiting the Lowry Park Zoo since she was a kid, but the tour she took the other night was definitely not what she remembers from her childhood.

Among the facts Chandler and her date learned on their “Wild at Heart” tour: Male pigs have a unique corkscrew endowment and impressive output; manatees have orgies and do not really care whether their partners are male or female; and a male porcupine has only one four-hour window a year to mate - and they have to proceed very carefully with the famle of the species.

Credit for the zoo sex tour concept goes to Jane Tollini, a former penguin keeper at the San Francisco Zoo. Tollini conceived the idea two decades ago while watching her penguins’ courtship ritual, which culminates in what she describes as “bowling pins making love.”

“The keepers get there early and we see things that other people don’t see,” Tollini said. “And I went, ‘My God, tha’s fascinating.’ You know the old Peter Sellers line, ‘I like to watch?’ You kind of go, ‘Oh my, my, my. How big? How many? How far?’ It was unbelievable.” She set the ritual to Johnny Mathis songs - the makeout tunes of her generation - pitched it to her bosses and a new zoo tradition was born. The idea soon spread to other zoos.