One of the key concepts we wanted to stress was the importance of environmental enrichment, including our use of ‘breed and cull’ in our daily management of the animals. Of course we couldn’t just cull some animals to show our colleagues how this is done. They know that already. But what we could do was to show how culled exotic animals can become feed - and how they should be fed - to our carnivores. So, we fed our
lions an entire eland cadaver and - very important, this - gave a talk about this for our guests, telling them why we do it, why it is so important and that we have done it here for so many years without complaints from the public. We wanted to show that it can be done, and
should be done in all serious zoos. It’s the message we provide to the usual daily zoo visitors, and we have trained our students and keepers to get it across. It’s what we stand for, and that is how our guests should see us.
...We ran a special event at the polar bears where our enrichment coordinator stood during the whole visit explaining to those that were interested why we do it and how we do it. Providing a horsehead for the polar bears is always good for starting discussion - again, something we
normally do and have had only a very few negative comments on.
