*Enrichment*

Dear readers.

Animal enrichment is part of our syllabus and course for this year. Before this year we helped the other 2nd years with their projects but never really understood the meaning and purpose of it. Enrichment is by definition the fighting of boredom. This is where you use a way to get the animal to not be bored in the enclosure the whole day either by interacting and playing or changing things like feeding methods or even just by creating its natural habitat in the enclosure that it will be staying in for the certain time frame.

In the next couple of photos I will show you a few different ways of enrichment and how you can implement it with the animals we have at the centre.

In this picture I took a pine cone from the shop at reception and I stuffed it with mince and fruit pieces to force Rosie the mongoose to search and dig for her food like they would have done in the wild. She loved the opportunity to use her paws seeing that the one is handy capped. This will not be implemented with every meal because we do not want her to get used to the implementation.

 Here I am implementing the enrichment program with Scarlet so she can be trained to take the food at the back of the enclosure to enable us to place the bowl with the rest of the food in the enclosure safely.

 When she is distracted we are able to place the rest of the food in the enclosure without any injuries or her attacking us.

In this picture I am in the enclosure with Lex and |Codee and we are just giving them some attention so the still get to interact with us and know our scents. They love when we come inside with new students for them to play with!

 In these 2 pictures I am interacting with Trigger the cheetah at the centre, he is a very sweet character and he loves purring whilst watching the world like nothing matters.