Put an okapi male and female together, wait a while and before you know it they have a calf, right? Well, if only it were that simple. Sometimes things don't go as we expect when it comes to breeding with zoo animals. Oftentimes that is because we do not take into account that animals need to actually get to know their future partner.
“You are what you eat!” is a common saying. Still, some people can eat whatever they want, while for others, the scale will go up after eating a single cookie. Why does this happen? A lot of it has to do with what you eat and how often you exercise, but there is more to it: you can also have a genetic predisposition to be over- or underweight. And in bonobos, new research shows this is also the case.
Is giraffe Barbie in ZOO Planckendael using her tongue to eat her food? Is she later spending time ruminating? Is she laying down or standing up when she ruminates? All these behaviours are indicators that we can monitor to assess Barbie’s welfare. Is Barbie’s coat shiny? How is her body condition? Does she have a runny nose? These characteristics on Barbie’s physical appearance are welfare indicators as well.
A couple of months ago I did something strange, even to my standards. I went to the ring-tailed lemur enclosure at Planckendael ZOO and asked the visitors: 'If you were a lemur, would you like to live here?'