Some giraffes are just regular giraffes. They eat leaves and hang around having long necks. But Armstrong Baillie, 32, of Dundee, Scotland, is not a regular giraffe. First of all, he’s not a giraffe. He’s a person in a giraffe costume. And then there’s the fact that he goes all around Scotland — he’s been seen all over the country, Dundee, Glasgow, Edinburgh — doing good deeds.
As Baillie (who calls himself, appropriately, The Good Giraffe) told the BBC, “It makes me happy when I see the difference in people when they see me in the suit. It makes them happy and it makes me feel cheery. The reason I picked a giraffe is that I have always been interested in animals and giraffes are my favorite animal. Giraffes are like me, as my head is in the clouds but my heart is in the right place.”
You’re probably wondering what kind of good deeds a guy in a giraffe costume carries out. Well. He hands out coffee to chilly pedestrians. He cleans up after pets. He gives gift certificates to moms in hospitals. And he hands out bananas to people running the Edinburgh Half Marathon.
You’re also probably wondering how a 32-year-old man has time to not only put on and launder a giraffe costume, which must be a bit of an undertaking, but to run around in said giraffe costume doing nice stuff for strangers. Would it surprise you to know that he does not have a job? We were not only not surprised, but inspired. Screw this working thing. Can’t we all just be The Good Giraffe?
