Although I have vivid childhood memories of snow leopards in London Zoo I don’t recall seeing them at Whipsnade either; they had gone before I started visiting Whipsnade regularly. (The Whipsnade female died in 1962 and the male died the following year; the Whipsnade born cubs were sent to Bronx Zoo before their parents had died.)
To answer your question: checking some old Whipsnade guidebooks shows that they were kept in that row of cat cages between the brown bear enclosure and the park boundary (i.e. the opposite side of the bear enclosure to Flint Pit Paddock).
(Incidentally, the last London Zoo female snow leopard died in 1966 and the male was sent to Amsterdam the following year as a mate for the female there.)
That confirms that i definitely didn't see a snow leopard at London then, if they had gone by 1967.
It just goes to show that successful breeding is not reliant on good enclosures, as from what i remember those ones were not great, but Whipsnade had success with Jaguars in those cages in the 70s. A suitable pairing is probably far more important so i just hope London's new tigers get on.
I can remember seeing Lien Ho the giant panda asleep in the roof girders of one of the big cages.
In the mid 50's most of the tigers were gifts from the Sultan of Johore,so were probably from Malaya.
Feeding time started with the joints of meat being pushe on a steel wheeled trolly into the main indoor area ; the noise from the wheels would excite all cats. Meat was pushed through openings under the main bars. I spent many afternoons in the service area playing with tiger cubs.
Feeding time started with the joints of meat being pushe on a steel wheeled trolly into the main indoor area ; the noise from the wheels would excite all cats. Meat was pushed through openings under the main bars..
I think the same trolley was still in use in the late 1960's, possibly later too. If memory serves me right, there was a bar at the bottom of each cage and the meat stick/hook was used to unhook and drop it down so the meat could be shoved through the gap and grabbed by the Cats.
There was an elderly pair of Jaguar for a long while in one of the smaller outdoor cages, and an immature male Tiger in another.
As I mentioned, I think the old Lion house was actually overcrowded with more species/animals than it was originally designed for- hence the 'indoor' cats being permanently indoors, and vice versa. I know they were rarely, if ever, rotated.
My love of London Zoo and wild cats drew me back to this thread. The house was probably more crowded in the last decade of its life, as it had to accommodate the overspill from the North Mammal House, emptied of its stock in the late 1960s after the Clore Pavilion was opened. Species like Temminck's cat, Clouded Leopard, Caracal and Serval were never part of its original remit; I can even remember seeing African Civets in there, in about 1974.
Glad I found this thread! My aunt tells a story about when she was young (probably in the mid 60s) and at the children's zoo in either London or Whipsnade, looking into a stall or loose-box sort of arrangement and a 'snow leopard' leaping up at her. My question is, would that have been possible and could it have been a snow leopard?
