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Zookeepers at the Tama Zoo and the Ueno Zoo, both in Tokyo, undergo annual training in what to do if an animal escapes. Although the training is serious business, it appears ridiculous to onlookers because they cannot use real animals. This year’s escaped animal drill at the Ueno Zoo featured a papier mâché rhinoceros. It appears to be the same fake rhino they used for the drill in 2008. Link -via Arbroath
See also: the Ueno Zoo’s zebra drill and the tiger drill at the Tama Zoo.
Sally is a 44-year-old Sumatran orangutan at the Denver Zoo. She developed a benign fibroid tumor of the uterus that was interfering with her other organs. Veterinarian Diana Boon arranged to collect orangutan blood from around the country and enlisted volunteer surgeons to remove the growth. The doctors tried to prepare but found a dearth of information on orangutan anatomy.
But when Sally lost the ability to go to the bathroom, Boon understood she had only days to live if the obstruction wasn’t removed. So on a Friday afternoon she fired off e-mails to the team, telling them the surgery had to be done by Sunday. And they wouldn’t have blood.
“It had to be a bloodless surgery,” Boon said. “It was either this would work, or this wouldn’t work and it would be fatal for Sally.”
And then, the group got a break. Covidien, a Boulder company that makes a device called LigaSure that helps limit blood-loss during surgery, donated the use of a machine for Sally’s sake.
Another snag loomed. The procedure demanded quite a bit of rummaging around in Sally’s abdomen. If a wayward blade nicked her distended bowel, she would die; Sally would not understand how to use a colostomy bag.
There were other hairy moments during the six hours of surgery, but Sally came through it. Read the entire story (and see a video) at The Denver Post. Link -via Fark
A Zanesville, Ohio, man who owned a large private menagerie of tigers, lions, bears and monkeys opened the cages to many of the exotic animals then killed himself in his home Tuesday. Around 5:30pm, his neighbors began calling the Muskingum County Sheriff’s Office to report sightings of animals wandering off of Terry Thompson’s land.
When police went to investigate, they were met by a herd of about 50 exotic animals, and Thompson’s body in the driveway. “I had deputies that had to shoot animals with their side arms,” said Muskingum County Sheriff Matt Lutz. Soon after, officials from nearby Columbus Zoo came armed with tranquilizers to help locate and rescue as many of the animals as possible. But it didn’t go as planned: ”We just had a huge tiger, an adult tiger that must’ve weighed 300 pounds, that was very aggressive. We got a tranquilizer in it, and this thing just went crazy,” Lutz said. After the incident, he ordered a shoot-to-kill for the remaining animals.
49 of Thompson’s 56 animals were dead and buried on his property, at the request of his estranged wife, by Wednesday morning. Authorities captured a grizzly, three leopards and two monkeys, which were sent to the Columbus Zoo for safekeeping. A baboon possibly infected with hepatitis B was still missing as of Wednesday night.
How did this happen?
Ohio has extremely lax governance over the ownership of exotic animals. The state’s “inadequate regulation” puts it near the bottom of the list in a 2009 report from the Humane Society of the United States. And earlier this year, an emergency rule which “prohibited people convicted of animal cruelty from owning exotic animals” expired, allowing Thompson, who was previously charged with and found guilty of animal cruelty and neglect, to keep his 56 lions and tigers and bears.
Public safety vs. animal protection
Immediately after this story broke, Zanesville residents and national news viewers began calling the sheriff’s office and Zanesville area shelter to ask why the animals–many of them listed as endangered species–were being killed rather than tranquilized or recaptured. The short answer: No time. The longer answer is best explained by Jack Hanna, beloved animal rights activist and director emeritus of the Columbus Zoo:
“[Y]ou can’t tranquilize an animal in the dark. It upsets them … they settle in, they hunker down, they go to sleep. Obviously, we can’t find them in the dark. So what had to be done had to be done. Even a bear came after one of the officers last night, and she was just trying to get out of a car. … No one loves animals more than me, but human life has to come first.”
As night descended on Ohio and liberated exotic animals ran loose, swift and decisive action was needed to protect the human residents of Zanesville; unfortunately, it was at the expense of Thompson’s pets. The Humane Society supports Lutz’s actions and those of his team, and PETA, in a written statement, blamed legislation instead of law enforcement for the deaths.
Preventative action
Over the years, Lutz received “around 35 calls” about Thompson’s farm–all concerning “animals running loose to animals not being treated properly.” He went on to say that his office has “handled numerous complaints here, we’ve done numerous inspections here. So this has been a huge problem for us for a number of years.”
Former governor of Ohio, Ted Strickland, imposed the legislation that was allowed by current governor, John Kasich, to lapse in April. Of Thompson, he said, “Someone with a record like this man was not intended to have these animals.” Strickland asserted that Thompson “would almost certainly have had his animals removed by May 1, 2011, if the emergency order had not expired.”
PETA, for its part, has been petitioning Ohio (and a number of other states) for years to institute “an outright ban” on owning exotic animals. The group is currently asking the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to “exercise its authority to declare emergency regulations to prohibit the keeping of exotic animals” as well as petitioning the state to “seize the animals over whom the agency has jurisdiction and see that they are placed in reputable sanctuaries.” Whether Gov. Kasich will comply has yet to be seen.
Is an outright ban on owning exotic animals the right move here, or should there just be stricter limitations on who can keep the animals (and where)?
Sources:
Did
animals know that the 5.8-magnitude earthquake was to hit the East Coast
before it happened? Maybe so, according to zoo keepers:
Behavior ranged from jumping into trees and "vocalizing," to banding together.
Red ruffed lemurs sounded a distinct high-pitched barking about 15 minutes before the quake, and then again after the shaking stopped.
Apes, including the orangutan Kyle and the Western lowland gorilla Kojo, abandoned feeding-time chow seconds before humans felt the quake and climbed to the top of a "tree-like structure."The easy-going pandas "did not appear to respond to the earthquake," zoo officials said. Also in the Great Ape House, the orangutan Iris began what zoo keepers describe as "belch vocalizing" before and after the quake. They describe the sound as an unhappy noise normally reserved for "extreme irritation."
And just before the quake, the zoo's flock of 64 flamingoes gathered close together in a "tight, flocking behavior," Moore said.
They looked, he said, "like a big pink ball."
Photo Credit: AP
Not that one is to believe that two heads are better than one… especially when it comes to snakes! Zookeepers in the Ukraine’s Skazka Zoo have experienced a doubling of visitors since this two-headed albino snake arrived on loan from Germany. Each head is able to act and think on its own. Zookeeper Rusian Yakovenko stated that sometimes the two heads will fight for food, not realizing that it has the same destination. They’ll even steal food from each other, making feedings interesting, to say the least. Workers state that the three-year-old two foot long snake is quite a handful. The private zoo is in the resort of Yalta on the Black Sea.
ZooBorns brings us news and pictures of baby animals born in zoos all over the world. Get the condensed version as Jill Harness culled the cutest pictures from Zooborns in a list at Oddee. The baby red panda shown is from the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. Link
An orangutan saves a tired baby chick with a leaf, then inspects it afterward to makes sure it’s all right. There’s not a ton of info available about this video (for instance, which zoo this is or when it was filmed), but the important takeaway here is that orangutans are both extraordinarily compassionate and also kind of gross, as evidenced by the first 40 seconds of the clip. How many times did you think the orangutan was going to eat the bird? I’m not gonna lie–I held my breath a few times.
via Pharyngula
An otter at Sea World in San Diego has fun with an energetic toddler. Which is what otters really are underneath that fur! -via Buzzfeed
You’d think that being in a cage would make it hard to feed a smoking habit, but that’s not the case in Malaysia. Here’s the shocking story of how visitors to the Johor Baru zoo fed Shirley, a 25-year-old orangutan cigarettes, just to watch her smoke:
The government-run zoo in in Johor Baru has erected a ‘no smoking’ sign but that will do precious little to stop the sad practice while attendants turn their backs on it.
Shirley spends much of her sad existence tearing apart drinks cans and chewing on food wrappers thrown at her by visitors.
She regularly reaches through the bars of her cage to beg for cigarettes.
The Daily Mail is there: Link
Neatorama author Jill Harness went to the zoo and brought back lots of pictures of all kinds of different animals. She fed a Galapagos tortoise, collided with an owl, and petted a giraffe! She also looked up fun facts about each of them, which you can read at Rue the Day. Do you know what animal is shown here? Link
Three-month old Evita the ocelot was born in January at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. She was introduced to zoo visitors for the first time yesterday. See more pictures at the zoo blog. Link -via Urlesque
“This guy is crazy!” …crazy like a fox. This is apparently a vending machine at a petting zoo from which people can buy treats to feed the animals. But Billy here has figured out how to “tap” into it himself! -via Buzzfeed
Update: purple_phoenix, who works there, tells us this is not a billy goat, but a female sheep! That’ll teach me to go by YouTube titles.
The New York Zoo and Aquarium has a generator in which you can design yourself as a fantastic wild animal! On the left is my basic although deceptively youthful self, and on the right I have Fennec fox ears, giant tree frog arms, pintail duck legs, and a ring-tailed lemur tail. There are lots of different animal limbs and features to select from for your personal wild self. Link -via Everlasting Blort
The Tama Zoo and the Ueno Zoo (both in Tokyo) perform annual training drills so that zookeepers know what to do when an animal escapes. Since they cannot use a dangerous beast, workers dress as the escapee, which gives zoo visitors and web surfers an entertaining interlude. The drill this week at the Tama Zoo featured a Siberian tiger who got out of its pen during an earthquake. -via Pink Tentacle
Previously: Rhino and Zebra drills.
This Russian site has photographs of a lynx that lives at the St. Petersburg Zoo. With a house cat. They are apparently very close friends. Link -via reddit
The Smithsonian National Zoological Park has installed a streaming webcam in a cheetah’s den, so that we can keep an eye on a mother cheetah and two cubs.
Female cheetah Zazi is raising a cub she gave birth to and another mother’s cub, both born in December 2010. Cheetahs that give birth to only one cub, called a singleton, cannot produce enough milk to keep the cub alive. The cub born to Amani, a first-time mother, was hand-raised for 13 days before being placed with Zazi, creating a litter of two that will likely help stimulate milk production from Zazi. These cheetahs are at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) in Front Royal, Virginia.
Link to webcam.
If you don’t see any action on the webcam, there is a gallery of baby cheetah pictures. Link -via KTAR
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What will a flock of penguins do when a fake penguin comes around? The Japanese TV show Shimura Zoo finds out. Link -via Everlasting Blort
No, he’s not rude. Jackson the Mandrill has arthritic finger that causes him to salute his viewers at the zoo. Mark Rogers, who took the photo of Jackson’s "we’re number one salute" said:
‘I was there photographing him, and a father and sons were watching him,’ said Mark Rogers, who captured the finger in full flight. ‘Jackson’s a bit grumpy and really doesn’t like being photographed, but what he likes even less is people shouting at him.
‘The father tried to make fake ape sounds and Jackson raised his hand with the finger extended. The entire crowd watching him then laughed out loud and the father quickly stopped making the noise.’
Mr Rogers added: ‘I did find out later that the mandrill had arthritis in that finger. I can’t help but wonder if he used that to his advantage.’
More at Metro: Link (Photo: Caters)
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A new cougar was born at the Oregon Zoo in Portland on September 19th. The cub and her mom Chinook are in seclusion, but you can see a video at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer blog. Link -via Fark
(Image credit: the Oregon Zoo)
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It was the perfect place to grow marijuana: a section of the rhinoceros pen that only one zookeeper had access to. A zookeeper in Austria thought he would never be caught.
Salzburg Hellbrunn Zoo director Sabine Grebner said today (Mon): “It’s horrible! We never thought such a thing was possible. We are here for families and kids – and we don’t have anything to do with drugs.”
Police said the 59-year-old rhinoceros carer kept 33 marijuana plants in a part of the enclosure which is hidden from visitors’ view, adding that they acted on an anonymous tip-off by “customer” of the offender.
(Image credit: Flickr user Martin Belam)
This baby monkey clings to a young boar for security as it roams about the Fukuchiyama Zoo in Kyoto, Japan. TV reports on the two have caused five times the usual number of people to visit the zoo!
Baby monkeys are known to cling to their mother for many months after they are born, and Miwa the orphaned monkey seems to think of the boar as his mommy (even though the boar is a boy). Miwa has also taken a liking to the woman who works at the zoo’s ticket counter. When he’s not riding the boar, Miwa is usually sleeping in the woman’s lap.
Both the monkey and the wild boar are growing up fast. The rodeos will only continue until the monkey grows out of the stage at which he feels it needs to cling to a parent – or – until the the boar will no longer tolerate the presence of a monkey on his back.
See several other videos of Miwa and the boar at Japan Probe. Link
Photo: Christina Spicuzza [Flickr]
Christina Spicuzza of Spicuzza Photo A Day went to the San Francisco Zoo last week and snapped this priceless photo of an inquisitive pair of gorillas playing with a Nintendo DS that someone had accidentally dropped into their habitat:
The gorilla tried all he could to figure the thing out turning it forward, backwards and holding it really close to his head. A trainer at the zoo was able to trade the DS for an apple and gave the console back to the boy who dropped it. It reportedly still worked though it was scratched and covered with gorilla slobber.
Link | Christina’s Blog | More photos on Flickr
Steef de Prouw built an entire zoo out of Lego bricks! It’s got all the things you expect at a zoo, including a duck pond, an enclosure with a missing sign that makes you wonder what is in there, zookeepers shoveling manure, an aquarium, the snackbar you must pass no matter where you are going, and the animals of course. It also has some things you don’t normally see in a zoo, like a crocodile in the monkey enclosure, clowns, and a kraken. Link -via b3ta
Dr. Peter Kertesz is a dentist in London, England. He has a regular clientele of patients he takes care of during the day. But he also moonlights: Dr. Kertesz recently worked on the huge teeth in the powerful jaws of two tigers at the Dartmoor Zoological Park near Plymouth. One of the tigers had to be treated for a broken tooth. Both were anaesthetized before their dental appointment.
Dr Kertesz is one of only a few specialist zoo dentists in the world, a sideline to his day job of treating humans at his surgery in London’s West End.
His animal career began more than 20 years ago when someone brought in their cat for treatment and he has carried out dental work on exotic species including whales, pandas and elephants.
Zoo curator Will Walker said: “We have had him twice before over the last couple of years to do all our bears and other tigers.”
Dr. Kertesz is paid well for his bravery and expertise, as the bill for the two tigers was £4,500. Link -via Arbroath
Frank Mickadeit, a columnist for the OC Register, is staying in a monkey cage at the Santa Ana Zoo in California. He’s been there three days, and is scheduled to come out at 4PM PDT (7PM EDT) today. Mickadeit joined the monkeys as a human exhibit. The sign attached labeled his species as Columnist horribilis. While they observed him, Mickadeit in turn observed the zoo visitors.
For seven hours, I was entertained and, I hope, moderately entertaining, as a parade of moms with strollers, grandparents with charges, art students from Santa Ana College, biology students from Fullerton College, friends, regular readers and media types wandered up.
If they had no idea a human being was on loan from the Register, the look on their faces said, “What the …” If they did know, they wanted to know, “Why the …”
“Three days, and you’re getting paid?” one woman asked, as I regaled onlookers with a variety of tricks that included blowing smoke rings and figuring out how to extract tiny bits of papaya from a hollow ball my keeper tossed at me.
“Well, uh, yeah, I guess I am getting paid,” I replied indignantly.
“Paid just to sit in a cage three days a week,” she said, shaking her head.
“Oh, no!” I said, finally realizing where she was going. “I’m not here three days every week!”
The zoo has a live webcam trained on their “human exhibit.” Link
(Image credit: Paul Bersebach, OC Register)
Most of the time, the image of a zoo is one of animal protection and education. However, the Beijing zoo has expanded this ‘education’ to include the culinary aspects of some of the more exotic animals housed therein.
For about 20-200 dollars, visitors to the Bin Feng Tang restaurant can sample hippo, scorpion, peacock, shark fin, kangaroo tail, or deer penis. Of course, the restaurant is not without controversy in the animal-loving world, and the restaurant and zoo are under fire for the practices.
“It is utterly inappropriate for a zoo to sell such items,” said Ge Rui of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. “One of the zoo’s missions is to foster love of animals and a desire to protect them. But by selling the meat of caged beasts, this zoo stimulates consumption and increases pressure on the animals in the wild. It is socially irresponsible.”
Link – via shanghaiist
From the Upcoming 
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Moody Gardens on Galveston Island in Texas welcomed rare twin baby pygmy lorises, a male and a female, born March 22nd. The pygmy loris is not an easy species to breed in captivity, but the twins’ mother Luyen has been very attentive to the babies. The lorises will go on display to the public when a new facility is finished in 2011. See more photos and a video at Zooborns. Link -via Fark
Watch as Oliver the otter creates a masterpiece to be auctioned off for the Pretoria Zoo in South Africa. -via Unique Daily
You might recall Sir David Attenborough introducing us to the lyrebird, a master of mimcry (and later the wonderful remix). Chook the lyrebird lives at the Adelaide Zoo. After a period of construction at the zoo, Chook was able to recreate the sounds of hammers, saws, and power tools exactly. Link -via Arbroath
I don’t know what’s really going on in this picture, but “turtle wax” was my first reaction. Link -via Buzzfeed
