Cats are going to cat, no matter where they are. You see this in videos posted from sanctuaries, too, which many people feel are the “opposite” of a zoo environment.
Watching / interacting with / messing with people is absolutely enriching for many zoo animals. People make loud noises and do weird things when you pounce close to them! I can’t add videos to a post with one video clip already, but I’ve got two that come to mind when thinking about cats actively interacting at windows.
The first was with Sophia, the elderly jaguar at Happy Hollow Zoo who unfortunately recently just passed. A couple of years ago I was hanging out there with a friend and he’s a huge cat person too, so we just camped out at her window for a while. She was alternating being up on a perch watching and patrolling and didn’t pay us much attention. But then this family with little kids came over, and they had the kids turn their back to the windows for a photo. She immediately ran up, bounced up behind the kids and pawed and mock-bit at the air. They screamed, everyone reacted, and then she just… decided that was enough and trotted back up to her perch to watch from afar. I could literally see her making the choice to go over, seeing something more interesting than two quietly adoring adults had showed up.
Second was last fall, with the lioness Ashoka at Zoo Boise. I was there for the Halloween event and obviously it was a busy day. I’d snagged some photos of her and the male earlier in the day before the hordes had arrived and, again, she didn’t care very much about me and my camera. So mid-afternoon I found myself back at the window again, with a gaggle of kiddos alongside me and her a good ten feet away, and I looked down to check my phone. BAM there’s lion paws in front of my face. And shame on me for depriving her, I didn’t do anything interesting like scream or jump or flinch. She gave up after a couple seconds and went down to paw at the kiddos… and was really interested in their treat buckets. My guess is maybe they looked like stuff she’d get enrichment in sometimes? But as little kiddos will do, after they got over the screaming, they took turns pulling little trinkets out of the baskets to show her, or tilting the buckets so she could see inside. And she was really into it!
Now, I’m not saying there isn’t some instinctual drive to stalk little loud running creatures, but even beyond that, kiddos are just good enrichment for big cats (when safely protected behind an appropriate barrier).
Here’s the article, and it’s about getting a pair of endangered leopards for a breeding program at the National Zoo in Washington DC, not for Trump to keep them as his personal pets.
To be honest, it’s a pretty crummy article. It interviews a lot of random people and implies a lot of inflammatory things, like would Trump like to keep them on leashes on the White House grounds? Or maybe make the leopards into new mascots of the National Zoo? (because - the interviewee says - they would be so much “cooler” than the pandas that have been in that role for decades - the pandas that are a representation of goodwill between the US and China)
But as far as what’s literally actually happening regarding Trump and the leopards… not much, a simple zoo-related negotiation and animal diplomacy, and not all the other things that the headline or the article are implying.
And what are you doing about it Anon? Learn about ecological restoration or get out of my way.
If you read ecology books printed in the 70s and 80s, they were absolutely convinced that whales and tigers would not survive the century. There’s a whole plot in Star Trek about how whales are extinct actually. Here in Argentina, we were sure that yaguaretés would have gone extinct. It was thought that rainforests would be forever lost, because there was no way that such complex ecosystems would be restored.
Now, you can go to Península Valdés and find that the whale population there is growing year after year, people can see them from their windows. In Iberá, where yaguaretés were extinct for over 70 years, there’s now a population of 35 and growing, after being reintroduced just five years ago. As for rainforests?
We’ve becoming very, very good on restoring them. Natural environments, when given space and time to heal, can return to that they were. And after all, all natural enviroments are managed by human societies. It is up to us to implement a good management, un buen gobierno.
I firmly believe our children and grandchildren will see a restoration of Earth like never before.
Millions of people are working on this. You can learn about it, perhaps even become one of them. Or be a pointless doomer in my ask box. Your choice.
Religious reference, but this reminded me of a hadeeth. (I also wound up talking about a success story about bringing an animal back from extinction in the wild, because I love deer and gazelles, stick around for a hopeful story, even if there are also horrible poachers.)
Anas ibn Malik reported that the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, “If the Final Hour comes while you have a shoot of a plant in your hands and it is possible to plant it before the Hour comes, you should plant it.”
We are never supposed to give up on this earth. Even if literal Judgment Day comes, when people abandon those closest to them, from spouses to children, worrying only about themselves and the fate of their own souls, if we can finish planting a sapling, we should do it.
We cannot give up on Earth.
Also… for a lovely local gazelle species, the Arabian oryx (Maha, so if you hear of Arab women with names like Maha and Reem, they’re named after the oryx and rhim gazelles respectively) that once roamed free in large herds, but were hunted to extinction in the 1970’s, with the last wild Arabian oryx killed in rhe Empty Quarter [Rub'il-Khali] desert in Saudi Arabia. However, some remained alive in captivity, zoos and personal ownership.
A common Yemeni citizen (because we barely have official government wildlife organizations here in Saudi Arabia nor in Yemen where he’s from, although that’s changed!), Basil As-Saedi bought all the Rhim gazelles he could from captivity, and raised them, letting then multiply, wanting to save them.
A Hadhrami man from Hadhramout (a mountainous region bordering Yemen, Oman, and Saudi Arabia), ‘AbdulLah Al-Duweila, did the same thing with the Arabian oryx, buying them from various sources, and building a reserve for them.
There have been tragedies, like one recorded where they found either recently freed or escapes (I forget which) gazelles from a reserve and scumbag poachers or even just one stupid, idiot poacher killed them all, and left their bodies lying dead, a complete waste of their lives, which must have been so heartbreaking for the rescuer(s) who freed them…
Sadly not the only incident, there were other Saudis recording themselves, quite proudly, on social media, having massacred a great number of gazelles from a reserve (a government-funded one!!!)…
But despite all setbacks, the Arabian oryx is no longer extinct, not even critically endangered, and it is now classified only as vulnerable! As its habitat is still at risk, so it could go extinct in the wild again unless conditiona improve, but they are helped by great numbers in captivity enabling breeding programs.
The Arabian oryx now exist in the thousands (1100 in the wild), 6000~7000 in wildlife reserves, zoos, and some under private ownership in gardens still. ♡
Sometimes I see some variety of North American Little Guy (opossum, raccoon, etc. ) and I’m like “okay”
BUT THEN I start thinking about how excited somebody from not-North-America would be to see this Guy. Like, would an Australian be excited to see the only marsupial not from their country? Are there raccoons in zoos on the other side of the world that are regarded as unique and exotic creatures? Idk but it’s made me more excited to see Guys in my area.
So, as an Australian, going to the zoo in China with a USAmerican and a Jamacian was an experience.
The first thing you should know about this experiences is I'm a fairly bush-raised child. Not entirely, but the vast majority of my school holidays were spent camping or on a property or otherwise out in the bush. (Not the Outback, although sometimes, but definitely the Bush. The great south-west forests, to be specific.)
I have seen more than my fair share of actually wild Australian wildlife. I am severely immune to snakes, spiders, frogs, kangaroos and wild foxes, rabbits and pigs (those shouldn't be in Australia, but they are. Also, if you ever see evidence of pigs in the bush, you leave immediately.)
So here we encounter jarring moment of dissonance the first.
We were walking past the kangaroo paddock and I'll admit I didn't even give it a second glance - it was a case of "Oh, kangaroos, how normal," And moving on. Didn't even register that they would be something to get excited about. It was literally like seeing a bird or the neighbour's cat.
Anyway, after awhile I noticed that I was no longer with my fellows because they were amazed by the kangaroos. They were staring, they were laughing, they were paying money to feed the fucking kangaroos like they were some sort of weird, special, exotic animal.
"Oh for fuck's sake, guys, they're just kangaroos!"
And then I realised I was with non-Australians and felt properly shamed.
We spent some (far too long of a) time with the kangaroos and moved on.
Anyway, as we were leaving we were walking through the American animals section and I've stopped dead in my tracks and squealed with excitement and raced over to an enclosure to coo and generally be a weird, animal-obsessed little moron. I'd never seen this animal in real life before but it was adorable and lovely and the cutest thing ever. And my Americas friends were looking at me like I'd grown another head because the animal that I was enamoured with and had never seen in person before, the animal that I was most excited about out of any that was there (including the baby tiger that I actually got to hold, guys)
When my father visited a Zoo in Germany, he was amazed to find people eagerly watching what appeared to be a large patch of dirt with holes in it. It took him a minute to realize that the exhibit was for prairie dogs and everyone was waiting to hopefully see one pop it's head out. Dad, who went to school in Eastern Oregon and regularly harassed the local prairie dog population there, had long known how to call them. So to amuse himself, he gave the high whistle he used to use at school and, sure enough, about 15 little heads popped up to see what was happening. What was happening was the local German patrons all losing their god damn minds
