The Pyongyang Zoo In North Korea Has A Chimpanzee That Smokes A Pack Of Cigarettes Every Day (Pics)

The Central Park Zoo in Pyongyang, North Korea is newly renovated and supposedly drawing in thousands of visitors to see its main attraction, a chimpanzee named Azalea who smokes a whole pack of cigarettes every day. Azalea is a 19-year-old female chimpanzee whose real name is Dalle, but somehow Dalle is short for Azalea in Korean so that’s what she goes by.

Guests allegedly file into the zoo every day to see this chimpanzee sucking down her cigarettes, laughing and giggling at this animal poisoning itself without any concept of how harmful smoking a pack of cigarettes each day is to the body:

Like the big girl that she is, Azalea lights her own cigarettes every time after one of the zookeepers tosses her a lighter.

via the NYPost:

Thrown a lighter by a zoo trainer, the chimpanzee lights her own cigarettes. If a lighter isn’t available, she can light up from lit cigarette if one is tossed her way.
Though such a sight would be cringe-worthy in many other locales, it seemed to delight visitors who roared with laughter on Wednesday as the chimpanzee, one of two at the zoo, sat puffing away as her trainer egged her on. The trainer also prompted her to touch her nose, bow thank you and do a simple dance.
The zoo is pulling in thousands of visitors a day with a slew of attractions ranging from such typical fare as elephants, giraffes, penguins and monkeys to a high-tech natural history museum with displays showing the origins of the solar system and the evolution of life on Earth.

The zoo staff insists that Azalea doesn’t inhale while smoking as if that somehow changes this situation at all.

In the Associated Press article over on the NYPost they go on to discuss the other attractions at Pyongyang’s Zoo, which probably sound ludicrous to most westerners:

Another of the most popular attractions that might come as a surprise to foreign visitors is the dog pavilion, which has everything from German shepherds to Shih Tsus. The zoo also has performances featuring other animals trained to do tricks, including a monkey that slam dunks basketballs, dogs trained to appear as though they can do addition on subtraction on an abacus and doves that fly around and land on a woman skating on an indoor stage.

I’m fairly certain that if someone here in America showed up at a zoo and the prime attraction was a German Shepherd sitting and shaking paws that zoo would 1) be shut down immediately because here in America we love dogs more than people and 2) people would file lawsuits against that zoo for trying to pass off dogs as rare animals.

This is North Korea though, and in the DPRK people don’t even know what an iPhone is, nor have they ever seen a waterpark, or heard of the NFL. They live in a bubble of state controlled news, so a German Shepherd probably seems like a Timberwolf to them. If the DPRK really wanted to blow minds with a zoo attraction they should get ahold of this chimpanzee instead:

…(h/t NYPost)…