@birdsandbats , I can't say you're wrong about that - I remember being flabbergasted that you could, through ineptitude, kill as many animals as you liked, but if a frog hit the floor, you were in deep trouble. If I had kept my mouth shut, other keepers wouldn't be warned that this is how that animal was likely to respond when her door was opened, and they might not have had the luck that I had. Months later, a coworker and I spent hours secretly searching the back of the reptile house for a monitor lizard he'd let loose, afraid to let our boss know about it, before we finally recaptured her. The reason for this strange zoo culture was that, a year or two before I started, there had been a series of animal escapes, some of them somewhat high profile, and the zoo got a lot of bad press over them. As a result, it led to an institutional culture in which allowing escapes of any kind, any definition became an unforgivable sin. I do know that the culture at that zoo has dramatically changed for the better (on this and many other fronts).
Up to this point, my posts on the felids have been focused on the big cats – tiger, jaguar, clouded leopard, and cheetah. I have worked with lion, leopard, snow leopard, and puma, but each to a fairly limited degree, and don’t really have much in the way of stories or expert knowledge of those species. And so, we’ll scoot on down to some of the smaller cats.
I’ve worked with servals at four zoos – three non-AZA, one AZA – and caracal at two zoos – one AZA, one non-AZA.
My experiences with the servals were much more in depth, not just based on the number of individuals at the number of zoos, but for how closely I worked with them and how much we interacted. My first serval – and one who I did not work with too closely – was the AZA one, an ambassador animal. She lived in some modular caging in our ambassador holding area, a living space that no one would consider adequate for an animal of her size today. Apart from that, she didn’t leave much of an impression on me, and my responsibilities with her were fairly basic – feed, water, and clean, usually while her primary trainer was working with her elsewhere – so not much needs to be said about her.
Servals are among the most abundant of cats in the private sector – so much so that I can actually go quite a while without seeing one on exhibit in an AZA facility (and perhaps as a result have seen fairly few truly great, or even decent, displays of this species. Perhaps it’s because they serve as a decent stand in, as far as visitors were concerned, for any cat that wasn’t a lion or tiger, and we’d frequently hear them called cheetahs, leopards, bobcats, etc.
The first non-AZA serval I worked with was at a very shabby roadside zoo, where he lived in a ramshackle wood and wire cage that had been tacked onto the side of an old mill in a forgotten corner of the zoo. We had no real shift area, so the only way to work with the cat was free contact, which was problematic because a) it was a fairly small space and b) it was a fairly unfriendly cat – the second you opened the door, he was hissing, spitting, and often advancing in a manner that was somewhat intimidating. As a result, most keepers tended to throw the meat (a lump of Nebraska diet), grab what poop they could (the poop in the back of the enclosure tended to mold, untouched), and run – the water bowl was up against the fence, and as such could be filled from the outside, though usually with a lot of spilling.
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The male serval I trained, demonstrating his newfound willingness to stay and wait for a meatball
I was new to the zoo and resolved to do better, so I started training the cat (I’d just discovered the concept of training at, like many young keepers, seemed to think that I invented it). And so, because I didn’t want any of the other keepers to half-butt glom onto my program and mess it up, I decided to train the cat using commands in Swahili (I’d studied abroad in college and was still fairly fluent at the time, so in fact I only even spoke to the cat in Swahili). Within a month, the cat was responding to commands for “Come,” “Stay,” “Sit,” “Jump” (to redirect him to an elevated platform, but also for exercise – both servals and caracals are amazing jumpers), and “Go Away.” This experience reinforced in me the belief that aggressive animals can actually be fairly easy to train – they at least want to interact with you, and it’s just a matter of redirecting that energy into a positive manner. By the time I left that zoo, the serval and I were on pretty decent terms, though I still never turned my back on him.
I had much warmer relations with the servals at the other two non-AZA zoos, where I worked with a pair of sisters at each. At one zoo they lived in a Behlen cage, with wood shavings for substrate, a few perches, and a nest box. At the other, a slightly larger, elongated cage of wooden poles with wire, grass and dirt substrate, and some deadfall and platforms, with nest boxes. At the later zoo, there was a small shift area, too small for both cats, but which allowed us to separate them for feeding, at least. In the Behlen cage at the other zoo (which didn’t even have an entry vestibule), we had to go in with both. At each zoo, the cats were out year round with a heat lamp in their nest box. The diet at both zoos was Nebraska feline diet (ground horse), supplemented with chickens, rats, rabbits, and other whole prey.
In the Behlen cage, we would clean and water in the morning; in the late afternoon, two keepers would go in to train the servals. Their behaviors were fairly basic – sit, stay, jump up (onto the roof of the nest box), and present paws. They would take their diet (which for some reason I never understood we mixed with oil and vitamin powder, something I’ve never done with feline diet anywhere else, and which made it smell rancid) in the form of several small meatballs, eating fairly gently from our hands. They were a very affectionate pair of cats, towards each other and towards us, and we talked a lot about leash-training them and taking them for walks, but never got around to it… perhaps for fear that maybe they wouldn’t be so well-behaved once they got outside.
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A keeper doing a training session with one of our servals. The cup at the front of her belt holds the meat mixture
Around the time I left the non-Behlen zoo, a make serval was brought in for breeding, and intros were in progress at the time I departed. Perhaps they should have gone slower. I was told by one of my former colleagues shortly after I’d left that the male had killed and partially eaten one of the females not long after I left. I considered myself very glad to not have been present for that experience.
Compared to servals, caracals struck me as very shy, very reclusive cats. My experience at the AZA zoo was with a pair of sisters on exhibit in a cage that had been built for big cats years ago, and was now repurposed for the servals. As a result, it was one of the finer habitats I’ve seen for this species, and I regret that it’s no longer in use – it was a good size, well-planted (you couldn’t have kept so many plants going with a leopard or jaguar in there), lot of deadfall, soil substrate, and a heated den building at the back, which would have been cramped for the bigger cats but was ideal for these guys. They weren’t the best of exhibit animals, and often stayed hunkered down in a little hollow towards the rear of the exhibit, with their tall, tufted ears and their eyes being all that was visible. So, a great habitat for them, but perhaps not the best suited for them as an exhibit.
That being said, they were also one in a row of cages, and we didn’t really interact with them except to give them food and clean, shifting them off exhibit in this case. I wonder what it would have been like if we’d had daily training sessions with them, like we did for the servals at the non-AZA zoo I worked at years after? I’ve heard a zoo professional say that for small cats in zoos, the biggest factor in determining their welfare isn’t the size of the exhibit or the amount of enrichment, it’s the relationship they have with the keeper. If they are calm and comfortable in our presence, they will thrive. If they are not, their lives will be filled with anxiety and neurosis.
At the non-AZA zoo, the lone caracal lived in a decently large but fairly sterile, concrete-floored, wire-fronted cage that ran alongside our giraffe barn. We had to work free contact with her, which stressed her out, as she had nowhere satisfactory to hide from us. She wasn’t a satisfying animal to work with, for reasons which we can largely attribute to the limitations of her habitat. I wanted to bring in wheelbarrow loads of sand to floor the exhibit, then some rocks and logs, but was vetoed by the owners (the owners of the zoo had an annoying habit of bringing in young, AZA trained keepers with lots of enthusiasm and a savior complex, telling them that they could have free rein to turn the place around, and then not allowing them to actually do anything, certainly anything that would cost money, until the keeper left as a burned out husk of who they were. I digress).
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Sahara, the caracal. She was never happy to see us
The smaller felids have historically had reputations in zoos of being poor doers, poor breeders, and poor exhibits. It was around this time that I decided it was because we treated them as second-class species, tucked in on the margins and given minimal resources and space. If given exhibits large enough and complex enough that they can feel secure, the chance to develop strong relationships with keepers to build confidence, and encouragement to use enrichment and participate in training, they could be excellent animals to work with and to display.
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