Remember how often visitors, especially children, are disappointed in not finding lions, tigers, monkeys… in their enclosures at the zoo? Sometimes one can find bears sulking near their night crawls, refusing to budge from their place, even after visitors try to attract their attention with cat calls. Sometimes visitors even throw pebbles or whatever they can find in a bid to wake up the sulking animals, often without success.
Interestingly, most of the zoo animals respond to the gestures/oral instructions of their keepers. The animal keepers, however, cannot sit near the enclosure all through the day and make the animals to remain in ‘public view’ all the time. The day seems to be not far off when visitors can find all the animals moving in their enclosures for a greater part of the day without the need for any prompting by the animal keepers.
A three-member team representing the Israel and Nature Parks Authority (INPA) are currently on a visit to the Indira Gandhi Zoological Park (IGZP) to share their expertise and innovative techniques with the animal keepers of Vizag Zoo.
The idea is to keep the zoo animals engaged with various simple activities to save the poor zoo animals the monotony of making a few rounds in their enclosure, having food and resting.
Simple innovative techniques have been developed to make the animals search for their food, just as they would hunt for food in the wild, instead of giving it to them on a platter.
The INPA delegates gave a presentation showing video clips of the innovative techniques adopted by them to keep the animals in their zoos engaged. They also made similar experiment in the wild to watch the behaviour of animals in the natural forests.
A mirror was placed in the lemur enclosure. A lemur was amused to see an ‘identical lemur’ looking at it and mimicking its action. It went near the mirror and even looked behind the mirror to see, if there was another one like it standing behind the mirror, drawing laughter from the animal keepers and guests.
The specially-made mirror is unbreakable and hence safe for the animals.
Water bottles were hung a little outside the chimpanzee enclosure. The chimps were seen trying to pull the bottles closer by using sticks kept in the cage. They manage to hold the bottle after several efforts. Such activities enhance the cognitive abilities of the zoo animals.
Curators of IGZP B. Vijaya Kumar and Sri Venkateswara Zoological Park (Tirupathi Zoo) K. Srinivasa Reddy and Zoo Doctor Srinivas were present.
