In this segment, Hoober-Bloob babies don't have to be human if they don't choose to be, so Mr. Some of the animals featured in 'If I Ran the Zoo' have been featured in a segment of The Hoober-Bloob Highway, a 1975 CBS TV Special. He also imagines the praise he receives from others, who are amazed at his 'new Zoo, McGrew Zoo'. Throughout the book he lists these creatures, starting with a lion with ten feet and escalating to more imaginative (and imaginary) creatures, such as the Fizza-ma-Wizza-ma-Dill, 'the world's biggest bird from the island of Gwark, who eats only pine trees, and spits out the bark.' The illustrations also grow wilder as McGrew imagines going to increasingly remote and exotic habitats and capturing each fanciful creature, bringing them all back to a zoo now filled with his wild new animals. He says that if he ran the zoo, he would let all of the current animals free and find new, more bizarre and exotic ones. In the book, Gerald McGrew is a kid who, when visiting a zoo, finds that the exotic animals are 'not good enough'.

If I Ran the Zoo is often credited with the first printed modern English use of the word 'nerd,' in the sentence 'And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo/And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep, and a Proo,/A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker too!' The book is likely a tribute to a child's imagination, because it ends with a reminder that all of the extraordinary creatures exist only in McGrew's head. The book is written in anapestic tetrameter, Seuss's usual verse type, and illustrated in Seuss's trademark pen and ink style. If I Ran the Zoo is a children's book written by Dr.

If i ran a zoo book