By Ben Rodgers
Editor
SUAMICO – Just like people, animals need friends to have a long, healthy life, and this month’s Animal of the Month is slowly working on making a new friend.
Rajan is a 13-year-old snow leopard who arrived at the NEW Zoo on May 30 from Tulsa, Oklahoma.
“It’s great to have a new animal,” said Carmen Murach, curator of animals. “Our resident female, Tami, has been alone for a while now, her last companion, Buster, died last year.”
Tami is 19 years old, considered eldery for any feline, and has a complicated history of making friends at previous zoos.
“She was a cat, who in formal institutions, was not compatible with other snow leopards,” Murach said. “In the wild they are very solitary animals.”
In Tami’s case, Murach said she is more afraid than anti-social. Previous male companions couldn’t handle rejection, so she got into scuffles and wound up injured.
That all changed with Buster, who got along well with Tami.
Murach is hopeful Rajan can pick up where Buster left off. Currently, the two are kept separate, but share the same habitat.
Unlike in the wild, in captivity even solitary animals like to have a companion, she said.
“Even the first day we’re seeing some positive signs that led us to believe they’re going to be OK with each other,” Murach said. “But these things are always up to the animals themselves.”
She said house cats are no different than snow leopards in terms of getting along.
Sometimes at home the old cat might not like a new one invading its space.
“Some cats will be friends within a couple of days,” Murach said. “Other cats will take months to even tolerate each other and with large carnivores like this, you don’t rush the process.”
Native to the rough, cold and mountainous terrain of Central Asia, snow leopards in the wild are critically endangered. Murach estimates there may be only 4,000 to 6,000 left.
But it’s hard for scientists to determine exact population numbers because the cats are so solitary.
Snow leopards eat wild goats and sheep, but due to global warming and loss of habitat, more snow leopards are ending up eating livestock, not unlike wolves in parts of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan.
“It’s easy to hate an animal that’s impaired your livelihood, especially when you are barely getting by yourself,” Murach said.
The NEW Zoo and other members of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums rely on visitors so the zoos can contribute to causes that help animals in the wild.
The Snow Leopard Trust focuses on education, and goes into schools to show children in Central Asia just how rare and important snow leopards are.
But the work AZA and its Species Survival Program has been doing to boost numbers in captivity can be seen at the NEW Zoo with Rajan.
Tami is too old to have babies, but AZA still wanted to make sure she had a friend, so in came Rajan.
The fact that SSP is looking for homes for snow leopards is in itself a sign that the population is doing well in captivity, Murach said.
“The SSP asked if we’d be willing to give her one more try with a third mate and we said ‘Sure, we have a setup here that works very well for introduction,’” Murach said.