Once upon a time…Dudley Zoo keeper Jay tells meerkats a story for World Book Day
It’s nice to settle down and listen to a good book – even if you are a meerkat.
Dudley Zoo marked World Book Day with the help of “Meerkat Mail” – a children’s book which is proving popular with the attraction’s young school visitors.
The zoo says it uses its animals to encourage visiting school groups to take up reading.
And while schoolchildren across the region were dressing up for the day, zoo staff decided to do their bit.
Zoo marketing assistant Louise Curtis said: “We’ve had quite a few educational visits recently from classes who are studying this book as their topic. So we thought it was apt to introduce it to our own mob of meerkats and they appeared to love listening to keeper Jay’s storytelling.”
Meerkat Mail tells the story of Sunny the meerkat who decides to leave his crowded family mob and go in search of his mongoose cousins.
As World Book Day took over classrooms across the West Midlands, new research revealed that, on average, parents spend more on costumes to dress their children up than they do on books throughout the whole year.
West Bromwich MP and Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson also used the national Book Day to condemn the fall in library borrowing as a “scandal”.
He said the number of books borrowed from public libraries in England has plummeted by almost 100 million since 2011. Research commissioned by the Labour party shows that the number of books borrowed from libraries fell from 255,128,957 in 2011 to 157,387,109 in 2018 – a 38 per cent decrease.
Mr Watson said: “It’s a scandal that almost 100 million fewer books are being borrowed from our public libraries. Council budgets have been cut to the bone by Tory austerity and our library services are paying the price.”
Laura Swaffield, chair of the Library Campaign, said that with more than 700 libraries have been lost since 2010, “the only surprise is that the decline in book loans isn’t even larger”. She added: “Research shows that reading is valued as sheer pleasure, an escape from stress and a way to increase empathy with others people. God knows we need these more than ever.”
