As a pedant of punctuation, you should hang your head in shame for that one.
And as a pedant of zoos, a fossa in the Cat House troubles me greatly. It should be in the Madagascar House, or the Small Carnivore House, or the Random Animals House. But not in the Cat House.
@Sooty: I actually agree with you in terms of your outrage at the placement of fossas in zoos. Cleveland Zoo curiously has a fossa exhibit in its "Primate, Cat & Aquatics" building alongside many cats, Houston Zoo has a fossa exhibit amongst a long line of cat enclosures, and San Antonio Zoo used to have a fossa exhibit in its "Cats of the World" zone. Are fossas really felines?
And as a pedant of zoos, a fossa in the Cat House troubles me greatly. It should be in the Madagascar House, or the Small Carnivore House, or the Random Animals House. But not in the Cat House.
The Cat House in Frankfurt Zoo is actually called the Asian Cat Jungle and did indeed use to house clouded leopards in this terrific exhibit (as well as asian lions, sumatran tigers and rusty-spotted cats in the other exhibits). Such a shame that the zoo chooses to get rid of a healthy breeding pair of clouded leopards for fossas instead for no apparant reason...
@sooty mangabey. Unfortuantely, Frankfurt dos not have a Madagascar house, a Small Carnivore House or a Random House, so the best place to keep them in is the Cathouse, which was formely called"Cat-Jungle South-East asia", but they changed the name now into just"Cat-Jungle". The Fossas have now a much bigger and better exhibit than in the Grizmekhouse, where they have lived many years.
I think, only a few Zoos worldwide do have a "Madagascar House".
They may have had a reason for the move but it was not a good one. Instead of keeping a rare species such as clouded leopard and is notoriusly hard to breed in captivity and whose numbers desperately need a boost in the EEP they switch them out with a much more common species that A) isn't from Asia and B) isn't even a cat, thereby ruining the theme and an otherwise very nice house. I also seem to remember them having some breeding success with the clouded leopards before they sent them away.
Oh yeah? Well here is a quote from a post that you made in the thread "Frankfurt Zoo" on 08-07-2008.
Frankfurt Zoo has stopped keeping clouded leopards and sent away the breeding pair with the last young to Ekilstuna,sweden.
That's unbelivable, because the formely director needed a few years to get them from Howletts and has build a very good and expensive exhibit for the clouded leopards in the"Cat-Jungle Southeast Asia".
In 2006 they bred for the first time, but the babies died, as like as the next litter in 2007. Now they have the third litter and raised successfully one young.
The reason for this is, because the clouded leopards were invisable for the zoo vistors, they never could see them ! Of course, they are noctornal animals, but the visitors didn't care about them, they are only interested in tigers and lions, and both species can be seen in the same house.
The new zoodirector wants to protect endangerd wildlife, is this the right way,protecting animals, to give away a highly endangerd species, which has just start breeding ?
While the answer is obviously no, there were a few periods when the Fossa was considered to be an aberrant feline. In 1939 and again in 1995 there were papers published saying that the Fossa really was a cat. Interestingly it is no more a civet than a cat either and is more closely related to mongooses.
