Entertaining enclosed animals in a rescue centre

Good morning/afternoon/evening/night,

After a quite depressing report last month, this one I guess will be more fun to read.

Since two weeks I have been working at the Rescate animal rescue centre in Alajuela, close to San Jose.

The rescue centre receives more then 3000 animals every year. Animals that are found in the wild, got injured, or were (illegally) kept as a pet before. All animals that arrive will be checked by a veterinarian for injuries, weaknesses and mental behavior. The goal is to prepare the animals to get back in the wild. Unfortunately, several animals have been to close to humans or didn’t learn from their parents how to survive, and therefore are kept in the rescue centre. Most of them can be watched by visitors, like in a regular zoo. Several animals get to stressed in contact with humans and need to be kept out of sight.

As a volunteer, we work mainly for the animals that can be watch in the visitor area of the rescue centre. Before I go into details about the work I do here, I want to inform you why so many animals arrive here every year.

Costa Rica is a country full of wild animals. Many local people will see them when they go into the forest or nature. When they see a young bird or mammal without it’s parents, they believe it’s left alone or it’s parents have died. This might be the case but often, parents just went hunting for food, or a young bird felt from the nest on the ground. The parents are still taking care of their children, as would humans do when their kid is left alone for a short time. If people take this animal out of it’s natural place, it often isn’t fit yet to survive by it’s own. If the animal is brought to the rescue centre inmediately, it still has a chance to adapt to it’s wildlife together with other animals of the same species. If people try to feed and raise it by themselves, it’s impossible to get it back into the wild.

Some people just like to have a wild animal as a pet. Wild animal trading is the 3th biggest illegal business in the world, after weapons and drugs. When the police or other governmental agency finds such pet, it will be confiscated and brought here. These animals never will be able to go back into the wild. They are to focused on humans, often had an unappropriate diet and have no idea how to get food in the wild.

Sometimes people find injured animals, for example because of electric wire, regular fences, entangled by human waste or being hit by a vehicle.

Another possibility is that an young animal is orphaned because it’s parents died, often being hunt. If the orphaned animal is old enough, it still has a good chance to survive in the wild when it’s brought in inmediately after being found.

Honestly, when I learned about all the reasons for animals brought into here, I was impressed realising that they manage to get most of these animals back into the wild. Within one week i will go to another part of the country, where these animals are prepared for release into their own nature. That must be a beautiful experience I imagine.

In the meantime here in the rescue centre we try to make live of the enclosed animals a little less boring. The enclosures where they live are furnitured with trees, leaves, branches, water, or whatever looks like their natural surrounding. But it’s still an enclosure, it’s small and the scenery never changes. Their food is normally served directly on a plate so there’s no real challenge for them. Our goal is to give them a little challenge and excitement (called an enrichment) once per week. How?

Every Monday we start thinking about the enrichment we want to give to each of these animals. The enrichment can be sensorial, food, environmental, cognitive and/or social. The idea is to vary the type and form of enrichment every week, to use food, materials, constructions that immitate the natural behaviour and prevent possible dangers in the construction or diet. When we construct the enrichment, we can not use wire, long pieces of rope, (they might get entangled or injured), food with to much fat, sweetness or calories (we don’t want obese animals). As we have to make enrichments for many animals, we can not spend to much time on the preparation (the animal should spend as least as much time using the enrichment as we spend on making it).

Apart from natural behavior we also have to think about the social behavior of the individuals that are in the enclosures. Some animals don’t like to share, or there’s a clear hierarchy in the group. To be sure that all animals in the enclosure get the chance to enjoy the enrichment, we need to make enough of them.

So what kind of enrichments have we been making these weeks?

For example, last week I was making some leave and meat balls for the jaguars. Starting with a little bowl of hay, you enwrap that with a big leave, put a little piece of meat, enwrap with another leave and continue up to 5 layers of leaves with small pieces of meat. Everything is tied together with a string of leave or vine branch. Luckily the climate in this country creates an abundance of fast growing plants like palm leaves, banana leaves and mainly grass leaves, that can also be used as strings by tearing them apart.

Another enrichment is a coconut in which we drilled some holes and filled these up with hay. Between the hay we put some mealworms, little pieces of fruit, spiders or pieces of egg or meat.

This week I was thinking of an appropriate enrichment for the coatis (the type of nosebears I first met in Monteverde cloud forest). Coatis use their nose to scan and dig the floor for insects, seeds or berries, so I wanted to make something where they have to do something similar. Together will one of our assistants we came up with the idea of making some leave racks in which we put some raisins, so they really have to work to find them.

Sometimes to enrichment can be really easy, like spreading some perfume around, or distribute a bucket of camomile enflavoured water through the enclosure.

After putting the enrichment in the enclosure (or throw it in, if we can not go in) we always watch the behaviour of the animals to see if they like the enrichment. Fortunately, in the last two weeks, most animals reacted positive on the enrichments. So although the spend their live locked up in a big cage, at least here they have something every week to look forward to. For us it’s nice to be able to do this for them. And of course it’s also nice to learn about the backstage work of animal centres. One time we had to clean a snake enclosure, while the snake was still inside. The assistant manager of course knew how to handle, but the snake got a bit to curious about what we came in for, so we had to leave it’s house and wait for anothe opportunity when it would be easier to get it.

Well, that’s it for now. I’ll try to share some photo’s and video’s about the enrichments and animal behaviour, but for most examples, you just have to wait untill I’m back and can show you all the rest.

Enjoy the cold autumn, here on the mainland the dry season is slowly starting.