A few weeks ago, one of my friends posted a Facebook memory of herself sitting with a capybara. It was adorable, and I showed this to my wife — who is extremely capy pilled — and within an hour we had tickets to get a “capybara experience” where we, too, would get to feed, pet and meet a real, live capybara.

There’s an animal preserve that’s about 45 minutes outside Binghamton (suffice to say that even for upstate, this is near the heart of nowhere, six miles southwest of bumfuck) that has a small zoo and much larger preserve for animals to roam wild when they’re not hanging with the humans.

They also offer “experiences” where you can get much closer than the average zoo visit. They include the capybara experience, but you can also apparently get up close and personal with sloths or penguins as well.

My son is sometimes hard to gauge on excitement, but he’d been talking about this trip for days beforehand so he was in, and boy oh boy did he have an absolute blast.

But enough chat. Some pictures!

The first part of the experience was getting up close and mostly personal with a tapir, in this case, Tucker. They love lettuce and carrots and he let us brush him. They have a long snout, and it’s prehensile, so they can actually use it to grab things (though not particularly well, per the trainer who was with us.)

But then … CAPY TIME!!!!

This is Kiwi and she’s my new best friend in the whole wide world.

We got to sit inside the enclosure with her for about a half hour and feed her. As you can see, my son was petting her — she didn’t allow it at first but she did eventually let us do it while being fed some lettuce (I was the first one she let pet her, huzzah!) and her hair is very coarse, sort of like a broom.

Kiwi is basically a capybara teenager, about 2/3rds of her full size. She weighs about 80 pounds and will get up to 120 or so. The animal park has two adult capybara and they are right next to where Kiwi is (the also have a big pond), but it turns out that capybara — though adorable — are quite territorial and will tear shit up Sharks and Jets style if they come across other capys near their space.

One thing I didn’t realize is that they sit on their haunches just like cats or bunnies, and OMG IT IS THE CUTEST THING EVER.

After we did that, we walked the rest of the park, and they have plenty of cool animals I didn’t get to snap pictures of, like tigers and lions and leopards, but we were there just after high noon and a lot of them were sleeping in the shade. No biggie; still very cool to see.

In fact, the only disappointment was that they are building a red panda exhibit but it’s not done yet, which means I’ll have to go back because red pandas were created in a lab to be 74% more adorable than any other animal known to humanity.

But a few more snaps!

Their camel models came in both one-hump and two-hump.

They had some amazing birds but I was impressed because this guy apparently roams completely free. It was funny because the capybara is right next to a few macaws and they were getting into a very loud argument while we were sitting there, squawking like hell at each other. The trainer said they do that a lot!

This was definitely my second favorite spot — they have a high deck where you can feed giraffe and get up close and personal with them. Their tongues are VERY long!

Do they look skeptical? They look skeptical.

Anyway, 13 out of 10 stars, had a great day and made a new best friend!