July 8
Things were pretty quiet at the cub weighing this week. Since they weren't getting shots or giving blood samples, it was just the keepers and the cubs. The cubs are getting more and more unwilling to be handled, which is to be expected with cubs raised by their mother. Pretty soon they will be too big to be weighed by us, but still too small to go down to the scale that we use to weigh their parents, and so for a few months we won't be able to weigh them at all. For the second week in a row the littlest one has gained the most weight, so now there is less than two pounds separating the three boys. As of July 5, their weights were: 17.45, 17.96, and 19.23 pounds.
We have started giving the cubs a ball every once in a while. Since tigers are predators it is natural for them to want to chase things so a ball can be a lot of fun. At first they were fascinated and a little afraid at the same time. They would swat the ball, but then jump back when it moved! I don't think they are afraid anymore, and as a matter of fact when we give them the ball in the afternoon, we find it in a water bowl the next morning, put there by their mother, Soyono. I guess she gets tired of the noise of a hard plastic ball bouncing off the cement walls.
Things that we do for the animals that encourage natural behavior are called enrichment. All the animals in the zoo get some form of enrichment. It can be something as simple as hiding an animal's food in its enclosure so that it has to work to find it, just as it would in the wild. It can be as complicated as training the animal for veterinary procedures. When an animal is being trained, it has to figure out what it has to do to make the keeper give it a reward. In the wild an animal will also have to figure out what it needs to do to eat. Some of the kinds of enrichment that we use here with the big cats are:
- Scents: These can be anything from perfume to giraffe poop!
- Food puzzles: We might hide a bone inside a pumpkin.
- Cardboard boxes: Some of the cats really enjoy tearing these apart, just like a prey animal!
- Toys on springs: We have a garage door spring hidden inside a PVC tube that we can attach things to, such as large boomer balls or pieces of fire hose. When the cats pull on the toys, the toys pull back. Very exciting and great exercise!
Cats that get lots of new experiences will be more confident and less fearful. This will help them a lot when they grow up and go off to another zoo as our boys will or, if they are in the wild, when they go off to find there own territory to live in.
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