At the San Diego Zoo, they feed live anolesto the birds in the australasian aviaries. Some of the lucky ones escape and you can see them occasionally scurrying around in the landscaping.
It’s arguably illegal in the UK to put a live vertebrate in an enviroment where it can be reasonably be expected to be killed. The law is incredibly vaguely worded, but it’s generally interpreted as that.
That said, most large carnivores will happily kill their own food, despite having been born in captivity. A lot of big cat enclosures are just a fence, open topped, and a few big cat keepers have told me they often find a big pile of feathers that wasn’t there last night when they come in in the morning… Of course, some are much better at catching stuff than others, and a few downright clumsy animals do survive in captivity that would clearly have starved in the wild, but it’s far from a rare event for a zoo animal to acquire its own lunch. I’ve even known only vaguely carnivorous animals like marmosets, many generation zoo bred, to grab a bird from flight and eat it.
This is about a deer that won a Darwin Award by jumping into a lion’s area at the zoo.
Mice generally can’t get out of a bathtub. [never actually bought a mouse for our cat, though we have also joked about it as a christmas present, but we trained Banzai to take his catch and eat it in the tub because I got tired of the wet little crunch-squish of stepping on a ‘present’ getting out of bed to pee in the middle of the night. Or rolling over and realize I am nose to nose with a ‘present’ on my pillow.
There was a youtube going around a few months back of a large bird [crane?] coming in for a landing in a tiger cage. It didn’t last long.
Not a tiger in sight, but a few lions.
I once had a 5" turtle in an aquarium. I was told to feed it live goldfish, which I bought at a local pet shop. But the turtle would, at best, get a piece of fin or tail, or even bite off the front of a fish’s face. The poor fish would suffer for a while, swimming erratically, until the turtle either was able to catch it or lost interest. For the most part, I had to debilitate the fish by harpooning them with an x-acto knife, and had to constantly remove dead remains that weren’t eaten. I hated having to do this, and got rid of the turtle.
I imagine this sort of problem would be true of zoo animals as well.
Well, a large cat =)
She didn’t seem to have trouble going after that interesting looking bird!
Would you object to the use of larger prey animals, like cows?
Our fisher cats get a live fish every week.
It doesn’t peg my evil meter, actually.
I have three distinct objections to the acts shown on the linked videos.
A] - My entire thought behind suggesting this idea is that it might make life for the zoo bound carnivores a little better by offering them an occasional interesting treat. Turning it into a public spectacle to excite tourists is unnecessary at best and probably counter-productive.
B] - I’m not sure how long it took those tigers to dispatch the cow but it took a few minutes I’m sure for it to bleed out. A tiger, one-on-one with a rabbit should be able to dispatch it in seconds generating less suffering for the sacrificial offering.
C] - Cows are tastier than rabbits. I like tigers and other big cats but give the beef to me.
“Nature is red in tooth and claw.” of course,
Isn’t there any legislation about it? Actually, I want to get my pdf copy. There must
a complete set of instructions for it.
Is anybody surprised by this? 
Meh. I know a few snake owners who feed live prey, mostly rats/mice but also rabbits.
Well, dropping a live cow in amonst the tigers certainly makes their lives more interesting. If you think letting the public see what top-level carnivores actually do to prey animals is counterproductive, then the feeding could certainly be done out of view of zoo visitors. However, I htink that maybe letting zoo visitors see the gruesome spectacle of big cats tearing apart a not-quite-dead prey animal would help squelch some people’s romantic notions of the “beauty” of nature. Maybe then they can make more fully informed decisions when it comes to supporting conservation efforts.
I think the typical manner of death for a big cat dispatching a large ungulate is suffocation: they grab them by the throat and clamp down.
For a demonstration of a big cat taking down a much smaller animal, look upthread for Arrendajo’s link to a video of some lions catching a wild heron that landed in their enclosure. The bird’s death is not particularly swift, tidy, or cruelty-free. Expect something similar if rabbits are offered: lots of chasing, chewing, batting around, and suffering before the rabbit finally succumbs.
Don’t worry, there’s plenty go go around. You’ve just got to get in there and take your share.
This seems to make it clear that you’d need a very good reason to do it in the UK. Page 48 (section 8.2.11) of a large pdf called Secretary of State’s Standards of Modern Zoo Practice, issued March 2000
It may not be strictly illegal, but I don’t think any zoo would want the hassle of justifying it to their licensing body.
snip.
Actually you can get any size or type of rodent live, or frozen thaw. Most zoos with large reptile collections maintain their own rodent farm for this purpose. Young, sick, or finicky animals will often only take live prey items. Likewise there are certain species that rarely are able to be transitioned to frozen thaw, (like calabar burrowing pythons) and simply do better on a diet of live.
Dumping a confused and baffled young cow into a tiger pen doesn’t seem very sporting.
For enrichment, lure coursing cheetah’s seems a bit more fun and humane for all parties involved.
