As reported in the last blog entry, the cat keepers have been seeing how the cats react differently to the large fishing rod that has been lowering down chunks of meat for them at the big cat feeds. We had so far tested it on Casper the White Lion, our youngest cat, who after initally being unsure of this strange new method of eating and playing, had become a keen participant in jumping up and working for his food, often grabbing the food before the keeper intended as he jumped higher than we thought he would. Then there was Rajiv, who seems to enjoy playing the waiting game, not wanting to put the effort in to jump most of the time, instead waiting for it to come down to his chomping jaws.
Today we fed Rajiv and Lola with the fishing rod. As usual we had a quite tame session with Rajiv. We then moved over to feed Lola and I managd to get the fishing rod over the enclosure fence, and before I could start lowering it down for her we were stunned by what must have been a 2 - 2 and a half metre standing vertical leap!! There was no run up or prop used, she just looked up and jumped straight up to grab the food. I was not expecting that at all and Lola rewarded me on the other end of the fishing rod with a nice adrenaline rush as she caught me completely off guard! Lola is a 15 year old cat and we take our hats off to here at her athetic ability at this age. She certainly has a lot of respect from the keepers and the from the watching public.
We hope to continue to enrich and exercise all our cats with this method, but as keepers we certainly look forward to feeding Lola like this again - what a beautiful tigress she is!
Photo of the Day -
'Sitting in the Morning Sun, I'll be sitting when the evening comes...'
I'm sure the great Otis Redding would have got one very well hanging out with a group of lemurs. Lemurs are known as Sun worshipers as most species can often be seen in the very amsuing pose of what is literally sun bathing and something us humans can certainly relate to. Lemurs have 'low metabolic basal rates' which helps them conserve energy during the dry season in Madagascar and can lower their metabolic rate to 20% below what would be expected for mammals of the same body mass. This trait is the reason for many of the lemurs behaviours to conserve loosing energy to heat loss such as group huddling and of course sun bathing.
Here is one of the iconic Ring Tailed Lemurs we have enjoying a sun bathing session this morning. He was perched in the tree tops with the 2 other members of her group doing the exact same thing:
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