they were coyotes.
Captive Hunting...
- Thread starter NZ Jeremy
- Start date
they were coyotes.
Panthera-leo
Member
on the first day of my workexpeirence the tigers at taronga had caught a possum overnight and had taken it up to their indoor enclosure and devoured everything expect for the some key parts. guess who had to clean it up! actually not me one of the keepers did. apparently they do it quite regularly.
torie
Well-Known Member
om quite a few of our roar and snores the tigers have cought possums and your always torn between staying and letting the group watch the skill and power of tigers and changing the subject very quickly and finding something eles to look at to spare them the blood. i find that with groups who have some background experience in animals, as macarbe as it sounds, they are very interested in staying to watch the way tigers work. but i dont envy you having to clean up the leftovers!
Meaghan Edwards
Well-Known Member
There was a deer some years ago who got into the lion enclosure at Toronto and was killed and eaten. I also observed their pride stalking a raccoon outside their enclosure.
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stretchedandy
Active Member
The Dingo's at Taronga Zoo quite often take Swamp foul that get into there enclosure. Ive witnessed one and although gruesome was also entertaining to watch there behavior. I was told that it was there third that week. It seems they might be getting a taste for them.
Sun Wukong
Well-Known Member
I remember watching a very interesting display of hunting (?) behaviour in chimpanzees more than a decade ago. It was in a zoo in Florida, USA, where the chimps were kept on an artificial island with different species of rather common wild ungulates (fallow deer, Eland, Blackbucks etc.) in a larger exhibit surrounding the island. Visitors could drive through the ungulate exhibit and past the chimp island on a small train. Additionally, You could watch this area of the zoo from a wooden bridge. While sitting on the slowly moving train, I saw a fallow deer buck swim over to the island and disappear in the tall grass. The chimp group sitting in the background of the enclosure at first did not seem to care, but after a while two or three adult males slowly stood up and started to move torwards the tall grass. What happened now reminds one of old Safari hunting stories and diverse Hollywood movies: all You could see was the faint movement of the tall grass where the chimps had disappeared and were quietly moving around, after having split up. It seemed like they were trying to surround the area where the deer most likely hid. Suddenly, it all happened very fast: the chimps closed down on the deer. With a outburst of energy, the deer "catapulted" itself of the grass, with the chimps breathing very close down its neck. A vast bound-and it just succeeded in jumping into the moat, thus escaping his simian pursuers. I don't know whether the chimps had just shown territorial defense behaviour or had really been determined to hunt down and kill the buck-but the popular images and movies of chimpanzees hunting down monkeys in the wild reminded me quite a bit of the purposefulness and speed of the attack I had witnessed back there.
Youtube also has several videos of Chester's chimps reacting to a brood of Mallards that have wandered into the roundhouse.
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to watch one of the videos.
Although Chester's chimps are not given meat products, they certainly seem to be aware that ducklings are edible. Having lived in a moated enclosure for so many generations, I wonder whether predation on ducks has become a part of the colony's culture?
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Although Chester's chimps are not given meat products, they certainly seem to be aware that ducklings are edible. Having lived in a moated enclosure for so many generations, I wonder whether predation on ducks has become a part of the colony's culture?
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