Baboon baby boom worries Uruguay zookeepers
MONTEVIDEO: A population explosion of baboons at a Uruguayan zoo has their keepers worried that the 130 increasingly aggressive animals will forcibly resist being moved to a larger enclosure. For years the troop of Hamadrya baboons — a species Old World monkeys native to the Horn of Africa and Yemen — has lived in a domed metal cage built for birds of prey at the Parque Lecocq, a reserve northwest of Montevideo. The 2,300 square meter cage used to have grass, palm trees and a lake with aquatic plants. “It was the most adequate environment, because there the species could develop socially,” said Parque Lecocq director Eduardo Tavares. The enormous cage made it difficult for the zookeepers to control the population, Tavares said, so the animals were allowed to do “what nature called them to do.” As the population grew, the animals destroyed all plant life inside the cage. In the current oversized colony, the baboons become “much more aggressive, there can be fights, there is competition for the females,” Tavares said. The baboons are peaceful when zoo workers enter the cage for routine cleanups and feeding, but “their aggressive nature emerges when one of them is captured, or when we try to take out one that has died,” said Tavares.The Parque Lecocq is nearing completion of an open-air enclosure for the baboons six times larger than the cage that will include rooms where zoo keepers can check the health of each animal — which will be tagged with a microchip — and carry out birth control procedures.
Honey ice-creams keep pandas cool in French heatwave
SAINT-AIGNAN, France: Two Chinese pandas in a French zoo are chilling out in the current summer heatwave with the help of honey and apple ice creams. With temperatures set to touch 40 degrees Celsius (104F) in central France this weekend, Yuan Zi and Huan Huan have been enjoying the home-made treats as a supplement to their normal bamboo-based diet. “Since Thursday we’ve been giving them ice cream that we make ourselves three times a day,” Rodolphe Delord, the director of Beauval Zoo, told AFP. “We also use cooling sprays and if it gets really hot they can go into their compound where the air conditioning is set at 20 degrees.” The two pandas have increased visitor numbers at the zoo by 50 percent since their arrival from China in mid-February. But the star attractions are not getting special treatment: all the other bears in the zoo are also enjoying daily ice creams.
— Compiled from agencies
