From You to Zoo is the latest initiative from Paradise Wildlife Park that brings our supporters closer to our animals in a completely new way.
Paradise has an Amazon wishlist set up where our supporters can see what our animals would like as enrichment. We then film the animals using the bought enrichment and say a special thank-you in the video. Our team then post it to our Facebook page for everyone to see your amazing contribution.
Items on the wishlist can range from blue barrels to toys to even food! It’s a fantastic way for our supporters to have a direct impact on our animals’ welfare as it provides great sources of enrichment. Enrichment is especially important for encouraging natural behaviours of our animals. From stalking to foraging, our different techniques are specially designed to target different aspects of natural instinct and behaviour you might see in the wild.
Emulating those natural behaviours and exercising natural behaviour is so important for animal welfare. It gets our animals doing what they do best and that’s being the fantastic animals that they are!
Did you know that our Amur tigers Aleena and Siberia love perfume? We use scent enrichment to exercise sensory development and they love the different smells. You can often see the girl rubbing their heads against poles and trees that the keepers sprayed with perfume. Sometimes, cats showcase a flehmen response, which is where they can be seen scrunching up their mouth or sticking out their tongue. This is the natural reaction for processing new smells!
Other forms of enrichment can be as fun as tiny ball pits for our smaller animals. Our ferrets absolutely loved bouncing around their new ball pit. The keepers placed little bits of food inside the ball pit, which encouraged the ferrets to search and forage through the balls. As you can see in the fantastic video we made of them, it is quite clear how much fun they are having as well.
Please consider sending us an enrichment item from our Amazon Wishlist, it would mean the absolute world to our keepers, team and animals. Make sure to leave us a gift note so we can send you a personal thank-you in the next From You to Zoo social video!
