Cute trumps brute in Philadelphia Zoo vote

She was a hardly a household name, and certainly no front-runner when the campaign began.

Not in a field with so many more powerful and famous figures.

But when the votes were tallied, a wide-eyed little critter from Vietnam, a pygmy loris, was elected the Philadelphia Zoo's "animal in chief."

"We're kind of surprised by the results," said spokeswoman Kirsten Wilf.

Zoo officials thought a big familiar animal would probably win, maybe a polar bear, or lion, she said.

But the Top 5 vote-getters all reside in the Small Mammal House, she said.

The vampire bat was runner-up, followed by an echidna, a meerkat, and a pygmy marmoset.

Then came largest beasts: African lion, Amur tiger, American alligator, African wild dog, and cheetah.

The winner, though, is a primate-relative that weighs only a pound or two.

Maily (pronounced MY-lee, as in Miley Cyrus) was so fragile as a baby, keepers took her home at night, to make sure she got constant care.

The little tree-climber even had a stuffed animal as a surrogate mom inside her quarters at the zoo.

Pygmy lorises have "short muzzles and tails, large eyes directed forward and short, dense coats. They are mainly brown or reddish-brown in color with white lines between their eyes, dark markings around their eyes and a faint dorsal stripe," according to a description at the zoo's website, www.philadelphiazoo.org.

Maily, whose name means "cherry blossom" in Vietnamese, got about a fifth of the votes: 437 out of 2,254.

Yes, vampire bats do suck blood, Wilf said of the second-place finisher.

"We feed them cow's blood every day at 11:30," she said.

Next came the echidna, which "looks like a porcupine but it lays eggs like a platypus," she said.

Four of the 50 candidates got no votes at all: the Rodrigues fruit bat, the ruffed lemur, the West African crown rail, and the white-handed gibbon.

The voting began on Election Day, Nov. 4, and the results were announced Tuesday, Inauguration Day.

"We wanted to give kids a chance to vote, to pick the animal in chief," Wilf said.

So was there a lot of fanfare, like a swearing-in, a parade and galas?

Maily was taken out - so she could be put in a box and weighed, Wilf said.

No other pomp and circumstance?

"An extra cricket for Maily, that's pretty much it," Wilf said.