KUALA LUMPUR, Jan. 24 (Xinhua) -- A petting zoo in Malaysia's Selangor state has put together an exhibition of 20 types of rodents from around the world for the Chinese new year, as Chinese around the world will celebrate the Year of the Rat.
Hosted at the Farm in the City petting zoo, the exhibition will run between January and February, with up to 4,000 visitors expected per day during the festive season, its chief executive officer Phoon Hoon Yeong told Xinhua.
The specimens on display include the world's biggest rodent, the Capybara from Amazon rainforest in South America, the second largest rodent namely the African Crested Porcupine, which is also the largest porcupine type and some of the smallest like the African dormouse.
Phoon explained that he previously organized similar exhibitions to mark the year of the chicken, snake, horse and dog, in an effort to showcase the uniqueness of the Chinese calendar, which rotates on the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac.
"So actually in Chinese calendar every year, they have a specific animal like year of rat, year of chicken, year of snake. So from here I think in Malaysia we have Chinese, we have Malay we have Indian, then they also find in Chinese calendar is something different with the international calendar, every year, they have a specific animal withstand of the year," he said.
Casually feeding potato leaves to one of the capybaras brought in for the exhibition, Phoon said most visitors to the zoo would never have known that it was a rodent, in fact the biggest of the family of rodents.
Phoon added that he wanted to raise awareness on the different species of the rodent family to dispel the idea that they were dirty, disease carrying animals but instead could be unique, cute and friendly.
"We would like to introduce the rodent family to our visitors because everybody thinks rats are dirty, breeding disease but actually are so many species of rodent, some of them are really cute and clean," he said.
