TIGERS: At the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum
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Enrichment for Great Cats
Wild felids devote much of their lives to stalking, killing, and consuming their prey. Big cats can range up to 20 miles in a single night in search of food and spend hours crushing bone and tearing flesh. Providing an outlet for cats' natural hunting behaviors in zoos can be a challenge, but keepers have designed enrichment activities that allow the carnivorous felines to chase, pounce, and chew.
Predatory Behavior
To stimulate predatory behavior, keepers toss hay-filled burlap sacks or cardboard boxes into the lion and tiger enclosures, which the cats pounce on and shred as if they were prey. Keepers may add olfactory interest to these items by scenting them with zebra or camel urine, perfumes, hunting lures, and herbs.
In the tiger yard, keepers can hook up to a tree a giant spring covered with PVC pipe to which they attach a hard plastic Boomer Ball® or burlap sack. The tigers attack and tug at the unyielding item as if it were struggling prey.
For the small cats, keepers hide meat and prey items throughout the enclosures. In the summertime, the fishing cats hunt for live goldfish released into their pools.
Feeding Schedule
Cats in the wild don't eat every day. After catching a prey animal, they will gorge themselves and fast for days until the next kill. Keepers feed the Zoo's cats daily, but designate Sundays as fast days in imitation of this schedule. On these days, lions and tigers eat light, snacking only on crunchy horsetails. Meat on the bone encourages natural crushing and tearing behaviors and help clean teeth.
Social Behavior
Unlike lions, who are social, most large cats are solitary. Tigers, for instance, live and hunt alone but communicate with one another by leaving behind scents. Keepers encourage marking by rotating the tigers through the exhibit's yards. Upon entering a yard recently occupied by another animal, a tiger will immediately patrol the grounds, sniff everything, and then re-mark the entire yard. They mark by wiping their back feet on the ground, urinating, or scratching tree trunks and big logs. The cats also use tree trunks as scratching posts to sharpen their claws.
Training
Training provides mental stimulation for the cats and helps to reduce stress associated with vet check-ups. Using a whistle and gobs of raw meat for positive reinforcement, keepers have trained the cats to sit, stand, lie down, come, walk away, open their mouths, roll over, jump onto a bench, present a shoulder or hip for an injection, and perform other actions. By training the cats to assume a number of different positions, vets can visually examine the animals without anesthesia.
Habitat Enrichment
Caracals are excellent jumpers and climbers. At the Zoo, a jungle gym of logs in their enclosure encourages these behaviors.
Tigers are strong swimmers and can travel long distances in the water. During the summer, the Zoo's tigers cool off in their moat, swimming, bobbing for frozen horsetails or attacking plastic Boomer Balls® or empty metal kegs in the water.
