One day, a boy went to the zoo in the eastern Chinese city of Luohe, located in the People’s Park of Luohe in the province of Henan. He noticed the lion was barking.

He pointed it out to his mother. (We so wish we could have overheard that conversation.)

The mother and the boy looked at the sign in front of the cage. It said, “African lion.” Then they looked in the cage. This is what they saw:

Today, amazingly, our bonehead is a zoo. It put a Tibetan Mastiff in the lion pen, then went around like everything was fine, business as usual. A dog in the lion pen.

Admittedly, it does seem like a foolproof plan. Who could possibly notice the difference between a lion and a dog? But the zoo didn’t account for the barking. And the six-year-old boy. A zoo, of all boneheads, should have accounted for the barking. And a six-year-old boy.

Once the zoo was caught, an administrator reassured guests. “The African lions will be back,” he said, according to the South China Morning Post. “They went to another zoo to breed.”

Ah, yes. Of course. But not everyone understands that it is the most natural thing in the world to replace lions who are breeding with Tibetan Mastiffs, when you are a zoo.

“To use a dog to impersonate a lion is definitely an insult to tourists,” said the mother of the boy.

“The zoo is absolutely cheating us,” she said in another interview, according to AFP.

Also discovered at this zoo: Foxes in the leopard’s den, a dog in the wolf den, and rodents in the snake cage. We imagine Jack Hanna spit out his morning coffee when he opened his computer this morning.

Obviously, this zoo does not have the dog’s best interests in mind, and thankfully the ruse was discovered so the dog can go back to being a dog. We hope that’s already happened.