Reply to I was a zookeeper at National Zoo. AMA.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why can’t you ethically put in a live goat with a tiger?[/quote]

It causes a lot of pain and distress for the prey. It can take awhile for a prey animal to die, and often it’s vicious. Know how your dog loves to play tug? That’s how wolves and painted dogs kill prey - everyone grabs a mouthful and pulls until the animal is ripped apart. Often they eat it while it’s still alive.

Keepers and zoo visitors love animals. They don’t want to see an animal suffer.

Plus there is potential for things to go wrong. Prey animals fight back and could injure or kill the zoo animal. The prey animal could be maimed but not killed or eaten, and now you have this injured animal laying around dying for hours or days.

[/quote]

As if zoo officials wouldn't step in and not allow a maimed goat to lie around for days.

And presumably a tiger would eat the whole thing solo seeing the zoo hates to keep naturally social animals together.

[/quote]

They may not be able to remove it.

All animals have the main exhibit, plus an area called “holding” off exhibit. They’re called into holding so that keepers can go in and clean the exhibit, and they’re rewarded with food for going into holding.

But if there’s a food source (injured goat) in the exhibit, the tiger has a lot less incentive to go inside. Why would it, when food is readily available?

Tigers are also generally solitary. But that’s a whole other issue - even social animals sometimes can’t be kept together.

At one zoo I worked at, we had two elephants who hated each other and would try to kill each other. So each had to be kept alone (since we only had the two). When we got new lions, it would take up to 2 years to introduce a new lion into the group. Orcas are social, but will kill each other in captivity.

This one is kind of cute - if you separate one meerkat away from the group (like to go to the vet), if you put it back in, the other meerkats will think it’s an intruder and kill it. So, you capture all the meerkats, put them into individual crates, keep them separate from each other for a few hours. Then put them together, spray a bunch of lavender around to calm them down, then open all the crate doors at the same time. They all think they’re the “new” meerkat and don’t try to kill each other. [/quote]

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