Can you imagine never having anything different in your life? Always eating the same thing for dinner, wearing the same clothes, watching the same tv show. Life would be beyond boring. How would this effect you physically? Mentally? Spiritually?
We constantly enrich our animals. It may be new food, toys, perfume sprayed on the display, perches rearranged, puzzle feeders, anything we can think of to stimulate their senses. If properly enriched, captive animals will keep and use their wild behaviors. Instead of putting food in bowls, we will scatter the food around the display so the animals will have to forage. We can't give the lions a gazelle, but we can give them boxes that they have to rip open to get the treat inside. We want our animals to behave the way they were designed to behave. And we never want them to become listless or apathetic.
Animal Enrichment Day is a time to educate and entertain the public. We work together making items for the day's theme and we have a set schedule with times posted so the public doesn't miss anything. Saturday's "theme" was cardboard boxes and tubes. The day started at 10:00 with the Sloth Bears, who were given large cardboard tubes. The tubes were filled with treats hidden in hay and peanut butter slathered on the outside. We used boxes to make hanging puzzle feeders for the primates and had large boxes sprayed with scents set out for predators to pounce on and shred apart. We also had extra browse for hoofstock, and a few other goodies like hammocks for the Siamangs and big barrels for the Spider Monkeys and catnip for the Maned Wolves. (Yes, the wolves love catnip!)
Sloth Bear "Chan" eating his favorite peanut butter.
Squirrel Monkey figuring out the puzzle feeder.
Jaguar "Ciapora" loves the deer scent.
