Once upon a time there was a giraffe named Suzie who lived on a ranch.
She wasn’t born on a ranch, she was born in the Melbourne zoo, in a pen next to some very loud koalas. But when she was two years old, the Melbourne zoo had decided to ship her to the United States where she was going to be part of an arranged marriage at the San Diego zoo. Enroute her plane had run into trouble. Suzie had been left when the pilot panicked and jumped out of the plane, but on its descent the plane had tipped sideways and Suzie had slid out of the open door in her packing crate and fallen down into a farm.
If she had landed on soil or rock, she would have easily died, but her box punched straight through the barn roof and went down into two stories of loose packed hay. So Suzie’s box had been broken, but she had simply waited for the farmer to come out into the barn and see what in the heck had caused all that ruckus. What he found was a giraffe, eating his hay.
The farmer had no need of a giraffe, but he figured his brother on the ranch might get a kick out of owning a giraffe. Neither one of them knew enough to contact the local news, which had run a three second video of the plane crash site the night before but the farmer had missed it because he’d been out milking. So they just figured the giraffe was theirs to look after.
Suzie trimmed the tree all along the farmer’s yard, and particularly like the green shoots high up. She wandered about with the cattle on the ranch, but never really got the hang of grass. The cows pushed her away, and she felt pretty lonely out on the open fields by herself. Then food got scarce.
The rains didn’t come and the rancher didn’t have the money to fee his herd grain. When that summer the grass went brown and eaten down to the stubs, Suzie showed the cows how to get the leaves from the trees to keep from starving. After that, they accepted her and followed her everywhere. So if you’re driving in backwoods Australia and see a giraffe leading a herd of cows, don’t be too surprised.
Moral: When we don’t fit in, it may be because we’ve got a better way of doing things .
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