Pretty much the title covers it. With the emphasis now on zoos ‘enriching’ the lives of their animals, using bigger enclosures and adding more natural habitats and giving them things to play with or amuse themselves (like the pretty wide spread practice of giving excess pumpkins to various animals post-Halloween), do zoos ever do the obvious thing by letting their predators hunt and kill their own meals sometimes?
It’s probably already done on the level of feeding live rodents to snakes, or fish to seals, but what about mammals being fed to large predator mammals. Like live rabbits turned loose into a wolf den, or maybe a goat into a lion enclosure?
My guess is that if the zoo includes exhibits of prey animal kept in groups, they’ll inevitably end up with more and more of them unless they actively cull somehow. Wouldn’t it be better to use ‘excess’ gazelles to make the leopard’s lives happier rather than just, IDK, pay a vet to put them down?
Okay, maybe you’d have to doing it early in the morning or after closing hours, to avoid possibly traumatizing little kids who’ve been more exposed to Disney cartoons than ‘nature bloody and wild’ natural science shows. Or maybe not, just have warnings to parents not to take their kids to X exhibit at Y time if you think it would upset them.
Hunting is a dangerous activity. If you’re desperately trying to breed, say, cheetahs back from the brink of extinction, the last thing you’d want to do is put your breeding stock at risk by having them hunt. In the wild, most hunts end in failure and injuries can be fatal. In captivity, you’re putting the prey in a corner. When animals are backed into a corner, they fight. There’s a good chance your gazelle will kill or injure the cheetah. Not worth it - there are better ways to enrich your animals.
But what about feeding them live sheep? It would help hone their stalking and attack skills on a soft target, better than having no skills at all if they were going to release them back into the wild at some point.
But don’t they feed live rats to snakes? Where does it end? Sheep are regularly slaughtered so it’s not like they are someone’s pet. How about chickens?
Ideally, no. Rats/mice are easier to have in a freezer and thaw as needed. Rat/mouse bites are a big negative to live feeding them to snakes, but some snakes will not take dead prey. And people are totally cool with rats/mice being killed.
But what about say zoos in Africa where they are actually wanting them to be released in the wild. Surely they must let them develop some actual hunting skills or they would die once released.
I don’t see a reason to let them learn to hunt outside of where they are from, like in the US or Europe. But Africa maybe.
I am pretty sure that animals which are easy to breed are put on birth control to avoid a surplus.
Yeah, but unfortunately most people’s sensibilities regard rodents as disposable pests, and chickens are cute, and not the same thing as the meat contained in cellophane packages at the grocery store.
Then there as this story from a few years ago that created a lot of drama, so I would imagine live feeds are generally a no-go:
You can search YouTube for videos of the Harbin zoo in China. I’ve seen some of these where a dump truck drives into the big-cat enclosure and dumps a live prey animal (donkey, sheep, etc.) right into the middle of a pack of hungry cats. The cats aren’t exactly hunting, but they do get to kill their prey. Not sure what the motive is for the zoo to do things this way, except maybe it’s easier to let the cats deal with a live animal instead of having the zookeeper kill/butcher the animal and then have to clean up.
Even with snakes and rats, if it’s a rare on endangered snake it is much safer to feed dead rats than live ones. Even if it’s a 1 in 100 chance, a rat can kill or maim a snake, and if you are trying to breed endangered snakes you won’t risk that unless you absolutely have to (as mentioned some snakes will not accept dead food).
In fishkeeping, most responsible fish owners frown on live feeding, mostly because the goldfish generally used for it are high in fat, have tough scales that are difficult for fish to digest, and can potentially injure your fish. Doesn’t mean it isn’t done (especially by the types who get a big predator fish specifically to feed it live food), but most fishkeepers will transition even wild caught fish who at first will only eat live food to prepared food. For example, you can start off feeding them shelled shrimp which you loosely tied to a string, then pull it through the water to generate movement; eventually the fish will learn to eat the shrimp when it is simply tossed in the tank, and with more work can be taught to eat pellets or flakes too.
Sure, I get that. But pet stores that sell “feeder mice” are not being boycotted. If they offered surplus puppies for use as food for Burmese Pythons there’s be an uproar.
