Halloween Treats: Boo at the Zoo (Photos)

Playing With Pumpkins at Colchester Zoo in the UK

As part of the Halloween festivities, many zoos in the United States and other parts of the world provide pumpkins to the animals in captivity.

This practice is an aspect of environmental enrichment, and encourages natural behaviors such as foraging and play.

Popularly known as "Boo at the Zoo," visitors can watch the antics that take place when these giant goodies arrive on the scene.

Often they contain the animals' favorite cuisine, such as crickets and cockroaches for the meerkats, or meat for the big cats.

A meerkat climbs out of a shaped pumpkin on Oct. 27 at the zoo in Hanover, Germany. (Jochen Luebke/AFP/Getty Images)

Meerkats inspect a shaped pumpkin on at the zoo in Hanover. (Jochen Luebke/AFP/Getty Images)

Lion mother Binta (L) and her babies Joco (R) and Zari inspect a shaped pumpkin filled with pieces of meat at the zoo in Hanover. (Jochen Luebke/AFP/Getty Images)

Kutchani, a four-year-old female African Lion, plays with a hand-carved Halloween pumpkin at Sydney's Taronga Zoo, 31 October 2005. (Greg Wood/AFP/Getty Images)

Follow EpochTimesSci & EpochTimesSpace on Twitter

Please send any feedback to qa.science@epochtimes.com




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

China goes organic after scandal of cooking oil from sewers

Image
Organic food sales have taken off in China after a series of safety scares, including the disclosure that one in 10 meals is cooked using oil dredged from the sewer. Police inspect illegal cooking oil, better known as 'drainage oil', seized during a crackdown in Beijing Photo: AFP/GETTY By Malcolm Moore, Nanhui 9:00PM BST 30 Aug 2010 The Chinese now consume more than twice as much organic food as health-conscious Japan. The market is worth an annual 10billion yuan (£1billion) having quadrupled in the past five years. For comparison, the British organic market is worth roughly £2billion. Interest has been promoted by a series of scares including toxic beans, contaminated milk and pork, pesticide-laced dumplings, chemically-tainted chicken, and the growing presence of what is know...
Keep reading

Gang murders man then sues for compensation

BEIJING - An arrest warrant was approved on Tuesday for nine members of a gang who killed a mentally-disabled man and then used his death as a pretext to extort money from a mine boss.Prosecutors said that seven members of the gang were charged with intentional homicide, and two others, including the lone female suspect, surnamed Ri, were accused of fraud.Prosecutors in East China's Jiangxi province said that five suspects, including the leader of the gang, surnamed Lu, bought a young man with mental-health problems for 5,200 yuan ($800) from a human trafficker in March.The woman suspect Ri helped fabricate fake identification for the man, according to Dongxiang county police.With the documents, the five suspects took him to apply for a job at the Dongxiang County Lead and Zinc Mining Co Ltd, media reports said.On March 11, only a few days after getting injury insurance, two suspects, surnamed Zhang and Yang, took the young man to a 37-meter-deep vent and pushed him down.He died on...
Keep reading

8,000 affected by icy highway havoc

Image
A severe cold snap swept through South China and froze over sections of the Beijing-Hong Kong-Macao Freeway in Guangdong province starting Dec 15, bringing traffic to a standstill and stranding over 8,000, chinanews.com reported Friday. Trucks and cars drive slowly on the Beijing-Hong Kong-Macao Freeway in Shaoguan county, South China's Guangdong province, Dec 16, 2010. [Photo/Chinanews.com] Ice started to crust over sections of the freeway in Shaoguan county of the province on Wednesday afternoon, as temperatures dropped to 3 degrees below zero. Traffic police launched an ice emergency response plan and traffic control on Thursday morning, when temperatures reached 5 below. Traffic troubles became worse later in the morning, as the ice on the road accumulated to over 5 centimeters. More vehicles became stranded in the jam. Police issued a more intense ice emergency response plan and closed some entrances to the freeway. As of Thursday night, more than 4,000 vehicles were delayed ...
Keep reading