Watch our Asiatic lions demonstrate audio recall and hear ZSL’s Jim Mackie explain more about the important of training for all the Zoo’s animals.
Lots of time is spent training the animals at our Zoos, always for the benefit of the individual animals involved. The benefits include providing physical exercise and cognitive challenges or ensuring a more stress-free experience for an animal receiving veterinary care, as well as the dedicated team providing it. Other reasons for training could be for safety reasons, so that a keeper can clean an animals enclosure, for example.
Audio recall is a great example of how training can be beneficial to an animal, helping us to care for them safely whilst also providing an engaging experience and wow factor for our visitors. In this video you will see how our Asiatic lionesses, Rubi, Heidi and Indi, having learnt to associate a specific sound with the action of moving fast to find a food reward, respond to the blowing of a whistle. This technique can be used to move the lions quickly to an area, where they are then provided with further enrichment – in this case, a scatter of small pieces of meat, which they really enjoy!
Most animals at ZSL London and Whipsnade Zoos are trained for enhanced welfare. For example, every single species of large carnivore at both ZSL’s Zoos, from our Asiatic lions and Sumatran tigers at London to the sloth bear and cheetahs at Whipsnade, have been trained to accept hand injections for vaccinations, ensuring stress-free check-ups.
But it’s not just the big animals that are being trained – across our two Zoos all kinds of animals benefit from carefully planned positive reinforcement training including, believe it or not……..even some fish!
- Find out how ZSL is working to protect Asiatic lions in the wild
- Learn more about enrichment and training
Liontrust, the specialist fund management company, are proud supporters of our Asiatic Lions.
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