Live prey

Stefka;505682 I mean said:
It looks like the Mallard landed in the Bear Pool by mistake, but bears aren't natural predators of semi-tame Mallards so it didn't react quite as quickly as it might have with e.g. a dog, otter or Fox. It seems confused but it does try to take off again but its too late by then. The bears seem to just play with it and hardly harm it at first, during which time it 'freezes' with fear, but its obviously 'curtains' for it by the end.

The heron video is very poor quality- maybe it landed on the wall by mistake- a bad move...;) The male Lion seems to leap up and catch it but a lioness then grabs it and runs inside- that seems to promote a scrap between them with the male trying to get it back. What happened to the heron seems unclear. The chief interest to me is how the crowd immediately get very excited.

I once saw a partgrown Peafowl chick (already feathered and able to fly) fly across a watermoat into a Gorilla exhibit. The male Gorilla approached but the chick stood its ground and the Gorilla wouldn't touch it.
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Pertinax said:
It looks like the Mallard landed in the Bear Pool by mistake, but bears aren't natural predators of semi-tame Mallards so it didn't react quite as quickly as it might have with e.g. a dog, otter or Fox. It seems confused but it does try to take off again but its too late by then. The bears seem to just play with it and hardly harm it at first, during which time it 'freezes' with fear, but its obviously 'curtains' for it by the end.

The heron video is very poor quality- maybe it landed on the wall by mistake- a bad move...;) The male Lion seems to leap up and catch it but a lioness then grabs it and runs inside- that seems to promote a scrap between them with the male trying to get it back. What happened to the heron seems unclear. The chief interest to me is how the crowd immediately get very excited.

I once saw a partgrown Peafowl chick (already feathered and able to fly) fly across a watermoat into a Gorilla exhibit. The male Gorilla approached but the chick stood its ground and the Gorilla wouldn't touch it.
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Allegedly Ruchi, London's Asian lioness, used to go fishing in the moat of her enclosure!! I don't know what fish were there, but the previous African lions had (as far as I know) left well alone. Ruchi obviously had been taking lessons from fishing cats somewhere!!:)
 
There's quite a few videos on youtube of chimps catching and torturing small animals. Including a rather infamous one with a frog. Generally though if large mammals are well fed they won't bother with catching anything themselves, it happens in the wild too. There's been many cases of people trying to feed their snakes with live prey and the snake has refused.
Like this - Snake and Hamster
It just takes so much more energy to catch and kill your own food than it does to take what your given.
 
Fishing cat fishing :-)

I´ve just discovered this great (and good quality) video of fishing cat on Zoo Praha youtube channel.
?ikovná rybá?ka - YouTube

It´s only in czech, so here are the important things the lady said:
They put a couple of fish in her pond once a week as a part of her enrichment. The cat can have HOURS of fun with them.
The cat´s name is Maruska, she´s 3 years old and comes from Olomouc Zoo.
 
I am personally for live feeding. Dont get me wrong the mice and rats are terribly cute and I would love to keep them all as pets but I have also noticed that there is a learning curb to catching prey in snakes.
Zoos in my opinion should support conservation and with the lack of live feeding a minor nervous system problem (hypothetically heritable) may go unnoticed but in the wild that animal might just be that much too slow to catch prey or that tiny bit off the mark during the hunt. Now if you breed with this healthy appearing animal and its decendants are released into the wild what are their chances of survival honestly?
Live feeding also exposes animals to the type of challenges they would experience in the wild. It may take a snake one or two bites from a rat to learn but I promise they do learn to avoid the teeth! (At least my 8 ratsnakes did, watching them learn as they grow is entertaining).
There are good reasons to avoid live feeding but I personally believe that the gains are more than the disadvantages, you are welcome to disagree with me, it is mearly my thoughts.
 
Weasle said:
I am personally for live feeding. Dont get me wrong the mice and rats are terribly cute and I would love to keep them all as pets but I have also noticed that there is a learning curb to catching prey in snakes.
Zoos in my opinion should support conservation and with the lack of live feeding a minor nervous system problem (hypothetically heritable) may go unnoticed but in the wild that animal might just be that much too slow to catch prey or that tiny bit off the mark during the hunt. Now if you breed with this healthy appearing animal and its decendants are released into the wild what are their chances of survival honestly?
Live feeding also exposes animals to the type of challenges they would experience in the wild. It may take a snake one or two bites from a rat to learn but I promise they do learn to avoid the teeth! (At least my 8 ratsnakes did, watching them learn as they grow is entertaining).
There are good reasons to avoid live feeding but I personally believe that the gains are more than the disadvantages, you are welcome to disagree with me, it is mearly my thoughts.
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Animal release is never done these days by chucking a bunch of animals in the wild and hoping they survive, it is done by soft release, any problems in catching food would be seen in stage one of this process.
So having removed that, your only gain is that you find it entertaining? When a snake can be killed by one bite on the spinal cord from a rodent, which happens very frequently in captivity due to the confined space both are trapped in, which doesn't resemble the wild situation at all, that is a ridiculous reason to feed live food, cruel to prey animal and cruel to predator.
 
Devi said:
Animal release is never done these days by chucking a bunch of animals in the wild and hoping they survive, it is done by soft release, any problems in catching food would be seen in stage one of this process.
So having removed that, your only gain is that you find it entertaining? When a snake can be killed by one bite on the spinal cord from a rodent, which happens very frequently in captivity due to the confined space both are trapped in, which doesn't resemble the wild situation at all, that is a ridiculous reason to feed live food, cruel to prey animal and cruel to predator.
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Soft release does not remove my point, a significant number of this animals descendants would not survive in the wild, meaning they would be brought back into captivity and would be near valueless to conservation efforts in terms of reintroduction (even those who are uneffected should be treated as carriers of said hypothetical problem and should be removed from breeding programs). Also you misunderstood me, the fact they are killing is not entertaining and lets face it how many would actually witness this? What I find entertaining is witnessing the learning of the animals to deal with problems. Also note, I did say there disadvantages.
 
At Longleat the Sealions catch live fish which pass through the lake, but then i suppose thats different.

I also saw a Polar bear exhibit somewhere with live fish and although great fun for the bears I watched them try for at least an hour and they had more chance of catching a cold (Do Polar Bears catch cold :-)

I don't see the problem as long as the fish have escape routes. I saw a tiger a london Zoo catch a duck which had inadvertantly swam under the fence into the moat.
A big splash and a load of feathers and it didn't end well for Daffy, although sad it was fascinating to see the speed and power (i don't think Daffy felt a thing)

I agree with most though and don't think live feeding will work, although there is double standards when it comes to the relative cuteness of the intended prey.

Cheers all,

STA
 
It seems that lions in Amsterdam love to hunt herons. :-) This video is much more recent (and better quality) and it´s an interesting footage when it comes to behavior - one lioness caught it and killed it but then the other one took over...

Lions attacking a bird and killing it in a zoo [HD] - YouTube
 
Stefka said:
It seems that lions in Amsterdam love to hunt herons. :-) This video is much more recent (and better quality) and it´s an interesting footage when it comes to behavior - one lioness caught it and killed it but then the other one took over...

Lions attacking a bird and killing it in a zoo [HD] - YouTube
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I went there a few months ago and the herons were idiotic, more than once I saw them enter both the lion enclosure and other predator enclosures, it's not great for them to eat live prey, but if the live prey invades their enclosure there's not much you can do!
I saw a tiger catch a rabbit once but can't remember where, maybe WMSP?
 
There are millions of wild rabbits in Australia - they are an introduced species that is listed as a pest.

At Werribee Zoo, just outside Melbourne, rabbits often wander into the cheetah enclosure. If you were the fastest animal on four legs, I am sure that you wouldn't mind a bit of sport, even though you were well fed? Needless to say, the keepers regularly collect rabbit carcasses when they do their rounds......
 
I have no issue with Zoo animals killing wild animals that pass through their enclosure if they chose to.

Placing live prey into an enclosure and leaving it no chance of escape just somehow doesn't seem right to me. I understand that ethically the end result is more or less the same as if the prey is killed by humans and fed to the animals but it just doesn't feel right.
 
Toronto's lions have killed a deer that came into their enclosure, and raccoons, swans, Canadian Geese and other birds have been killed by their various predators from meerkats to wolves to tigers (and non usual predators, a bird was killed by an Orang).
 
Meaghan Edwards said:
Toronto's lions have killed a deer that came into their enclosure, and raccoons, swans, Canadian Geese and other birds have been killed by their various predators from meerkats to wolves to tigers (and non usual predators, a bird was killed by an Orang).
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How did a deer get into a lion enclosure? I'm assuming any enclosure a deer can get into a lion can get out of?
But yes, I have seen apes kill everything, there's videos online of them catching pigeons, frogs, fish, anything that has strayed into their enclosure, and they don't seem to have the quick killing techniques of the big cats.
 
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