スミソニアン国立動物園のインスタグラム(smithsonianzoo) - 7月23日 04時23分

🐼 It's not a 🥳 party without 🎂 cake! #MeiXiang got a panda-friendly frozen cake made of diluted juice and fruit created by our department of nutrition science to celebrate her 21st birthday! #PandaStory

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alibaba62398 @kevin_drake_jersey just as these animals face different challenges and scenarios in the wild requiring them to use their senses, zoos and pet owners such as myself with my parrot, implement enrichment. It’s basically different stimuli in the form of different toys, obstacles, treats, and habitat modifications routinely so the animals have something new to do and explore given they’re living in captivity. We can’t just release them as they have no idea how to survive and face dangers like wild competitors seeing them as intruders, starvation with ongoing climate change, disease promoted with weaker genes as a result of habitat loss and fragmentation, less suitable habitat for them as it’s cleared by humans, and poaching for body parts in East Asian markets. They not only get well fed a well rounded diet by vets who monitor them 24/7, but these ambassador animals serve as research subjects to at least get an idea of their biology and ecology, which helps (with Zoo revenue from attendance fees) conserve their wild habitat and encourage locals (often at the mercy of corrupt governments or militias as impoverished peoples) to respect and protect them in the wild with the help and support of conservationists who also provide local jobs and education that their governments withhold (which is why they resort to poaching and selling parts just to feed their families and survive).

alibaba62398 @kevin_drake_jersey no no of course they wouldn’t feed them sugary human cake. However as for other diets offered to captive animals, just because it’s not found in the wild doesn’t make it a bad food source. Consider that cat food usually contains beef, salmon, or chicken yet the ancestral African wildcat from which modern house cats descended from have a diet of reptiles, bird eggs, wild bird species such as guineafowl, and tons of small mammals native to Africa. The food itself offered is nutritionally complete and the cats thrive additionally under veterinary care. The cake here is likely made of several vegetable ingredients and lots of ice cubes (I volunteer at a zoo and to change things up for the animals, we place their diet to freeze in cubes so rather the animals just eat and plop bored, they have to dig, claw, bite, and use their senses to get to the food as close as they would in the wild as we can replicate).

alibaba62398 @kevin_drake_jersey of course it’s for the animals benefit. If it’s in captivity and not having to use its senses to wander in search of food and resources, the best they can do is change up its environment a little. And just because the cake is a human aspect even though it’s formulated for the panda here, it’s not harming it. The panda doesn’t lose its “panda dignity” just because it gets to indulge in an occasional treat. Otherwise it’d be like a lot of zoos abroad where the animals literally have nothing to play with or do and are indeed in concrete pens without hiding places to avoid crowds and indeed for amusement.

kevin_drake_jersey @alibaba62398 does the cake really benefit the animal though? Or is it something the zoo employees do to amuse themselves because they think it is silly to anthropomorph an animal by dressing it up in clothes or giving it human things like a cake? If it’s not for an animal’s benefit and is just for human amusement then I don’t support it.

kevin_drake_jersey @alibaba62398 I would hope they would not make cake from humans to feed the animals. That would have many moral and ethical problems, even if people willingly donated their bodies. I wish the zoo would stick to giving the animals healthy foods they would eat in the wild. Not cake.

alibaba62398 @kevin_drake_jersey it’s not human cake. And their department of nutrition specifically made it for her. They aren’t restricted to bamboo as being of the order Carnivora either.

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