nyala are very fond of roses. yea thta looks very dangerouse for the elephant but you can tell she has done this before. do the elephants at chester hav access to grass or is it a permanant hard stand
nyala are very fond of roses. yea thta looks very dangerouse for the elephant but you can tell she has done this before. do the elephants at chester hav access to grass or is it a permanant hard stand
Unfortunatly it is just sand at the moment. It used to be concrete I think, and then mud/dirt but it has recently been refurbished with the soft sand it has now. I have heard that they have tried growing grass before, but the soil is all wrong for it.
I think Chester's aim is to extend the paddock at some point to include a grassy paddock, but the question is where. From a planning perspective, it is somewhat 'locked' I think (unless they can relocate Asian Plains).
I don't know 100% I'm afriad. I think they are trained, but with the number of accidents that happen with contact training etc, maybe they don't want to take the risk. There are many stories of fully-trained elephants turning without any notice, imagine if that happened outside the enclosure .
Those who haven't visited Chester should realise that the elephant paddock looks nothing like this today. If you stood where this photograph was taken you'd actually be in with them now.
One long-term suggestion to extend the paddock by building a new bridge (to give the elephants access beneath it) and utilising the area currently occupied by the Indian rhinos. It has been suggested it could even extend down to the spectacled bears, obliterating Fruit Bat Forest along the way.
Fingers crossed they will still keep Indian Rhinos if that goes ahead. As for the Fruit Bat Forest, I don't know if it's just because I'm young but it's been there as long as I can remember!
Including at Chester, but this photo is too late to be Jumbolino, who paid the ultimate price for his fall. Thankfully the moat is long gone and the paddock is completely different now.
