AWCP reports full house of remarkable animals, urges public to avoid acquiring exotic pets

By Neve Clinton

The Alameda Wildlife Conservation Park’s main priority is the conservation of endangered species, and it takes pride in showcasing an array of spectacular, often exotic, animals, relying on visits from both tourists and locals for revenue streams to continue conservation efforts.

However, Operations Coordinator Vanda Marnoto urges the public to think carefully before acquiring exotic pets which are difficult to care for as they can end up being taken in by the park, which is already at full capacity and housing 17 rescued animals.

She said, this takes up time, energy and space, and would be avoidable if owners made more careful, conscious decisions, allowing resources to be spent on enriching the lives and breeding prospects of endangered animals currently resident at the park.

She added that the AWCP has also been housing confiscated animals, such as the recently seized crocodilian, the grey parrots, long-tailed monkeys and macaques on show, since it opened in 1994.

“The park has a commitment with the local government to house any confiscated animals, whether it's at the border or nearby ships that are trying to illegally pass them on to European countries,” she said.

“So they just end up here, and then it's up to us to try to send them to another zoo,” because they can no longer be reintroduced to the wild if their origin is unknown and they are mostly brought in as babies, so would “never be able to manage back in the wild”.

Regardless of how the animals came to be at the park, Ms Marnoto treats them all with care. For her, all animals are equally cherished, and they deserve enclosures which can provide them with agency, independence and enrichment.

She said, “enrichment can be divided into five categories; it's either food related, sense related, physical, social, and cognitive.”

“So we try to vary between these five, we can make combinations, and we start easy and then the next time we give it, we always add a degree of difficulty, because that's what they would do in the wild”.

“In the wild, they would find obstacles to get to the food and they would have to do problem solving too.”

Therefore, the feeding method used includes multiple feeding times per day, set up in a way that makes the animals work for the food and allows them to delay how quickly they eat it.

Ms Marnoto highlighted the parrots, for example, which spend 40-60% of their waking time in nature looking for food, so if they are hand-fed in the morning and in the afternoon for five minutes at a time, they would have nothing to do for the rest of the day.

“So when we provide enrichment in a way that extends the feeding times and that allows them to always come back to the food at any time, they control when they want to eat, what they want to eat.”

“It’s really good. And we're continuously improving on enrichment, making it harder and more challenging for them”, she said.

They are also continuously improving the enclosures. For example, the two pairs of cotton-top tamarins, results of a conservation programme at the zoo aiming to help these critically endangered primates reproduce, are currently in two separate enclosures, but an overhead passage is being built to connect them.

Ms Marnoto said, “the idea is to connect this pair with the other pair, so they can change habitats every once in a while, which means that they're now going to be exploring a new habitat in a few months' time once we finish the passage… that way we can move animals around and they're not going to spend a lifetime in the same habitat”.

She said the park’s goal is to create new, immersive, larger habitats for the animals as well as more small mixed-species ecosystems, such as their walkthrough enclosure containing ring-tailed lemurs, peafowl and a tortoise.

However, “to be able to create new habitats for the animals, it's going to depend on the income from the ticket office, which is why, to us, it's so important to have visitors and donations and sponsorships.”

One of the ways the park attracts visitors is through the Lemur Experience, a lemur meet-and-greet and feeding session, which costs £55 for a family of three and includes access to the rest of the park.

Ryan Maggs and his eight-year-old son Oscar, tourists from the UK, got the chance to experience this, saying they were attracted to the park because they are “always visiting conservation sites and areas” and it seemed like a good place to bring small children.

As part of the experience, Oscar got to “feed the lemurs some sweet potato”, which he learnt were ring-tailed lemurs from Madagascar, adding “I really liked it ‘cause they’re really cute and friendly”, with his father adding that they were very gentle creatures and fast eaters.

On the AWCP’s overall initiative, Ryan said, “all the animals have been taken by the authorities, haven’t they? So it's nice to see that someone cares about them. So we're going to have a look at all the ones that have now got better homes and won't be where they shouldn't be”.

As for the park’s brown lemurs, Ms Marnoto highlighted, they had been housed in very good conditions and well taken care of by a wealthy person in the south of France. However, this still does not justify keeping them as pets as they are wild animals.

Additionally, the reason why they ended up in the AWCP was because their owner passed away and the animals were rescued, and this is one of the messages the park really wants to get across:

With some animals living up to 80 or 100 years, “if you acquire them as your companion animal, they're going to outlive you.”

“So what's going to happen with them if something happens to you? This is the sort of thing that we really like to have people think about before they go out and buy or even adopt an animal, regardless of the species.”

She also added that most of the parrots at the park are “former companion animals that were, again, abandoned. I look like a broken record, but it's true”, as “they live so long and they're so loud.”

“You want to watch TV, you can't because you've got a parrot in your ear, and they will defecate all over the place”, which is food for thought when considering a parrot as a pet.

Ms Marnoto reiterated, “between 60% - 70% of the animal collection here at the AWCP are wild animals that were acquired as companion animals and then abandoned”, and encouraged people to do “proper research on the species’ requirements, whether it's space requirements, feeding, whether the animals are nocturnal or diurnal, whether they're social or solitary animals, if they would adapt well to the environment in Gibraltar.”

She underscored that it is of utmost importance to ensure proper documentation to import the animal into Gibraltar is acquired first.

To keep up to date on new activity or animals at the park, download the AWCP app or follow the park’s social media pages.