Cuddling Clouded Leopards!

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Today culminated in actual contact with Clouded leopard cubs! We headed out to the Khao Kheow Open Zoo a couple of hours outside of Bangkok to visit the Clouded leopard breeding program our zoo supports. Our colleague Andy has relieved the project manager at the facility for the past few years. (Click here or go to www.pdza.org and scroll down to Adventures in Thailand to read about some of Andy's experiences this year -- not a lot of sleep, but plenty of Clouded leopard cubs to keep him on his toes!)

They currently have 29 Clouded leopards at the facility including many active breeding couples. For Clouded leopards to breed successfully, they typically need to be paired from a young age and raised together because otherwise they can become aggressive toward their partners. National Zoo heads up this program with the cooperation of a number of zoos in Thailand which have sent their Clouded leopards to Khao Kheow for the breeding project.

We walked around and saw their adults who are housed in former aviaries constructed by the Thai army. The cats love to climb, so the aviaries filled with logs and limbs work out well for them. Then we went to the building where the juveniles live.

I should interject here for those of you who don't know - I'm not a zookeeper at my zoo. I work in the office, and if I'm lucky I get to touch a sea star with one finger or touch a lynx on his back if he walks by my office on a leash. I am not typically allowed to play with animals, so I am absolutely enthralled every time I get to pretend I'm a zookeeper.

We went in an enclosure with two playful, rambunctious cubs. Wendy scooped up a cub and then handed him to me. Their paws are enormous! He (or she?) licked me. Nose to nose with a Clouded leopard, I scratched his head. The fur is thick and kind of nappy, the patterns resembling clouds (thus the name). Amazing cats, but DEFINITELY not house cats for anyone out there who may think they'd be a great addition to the family. If you've ever seen a model of a Clouded leopard skull, you can see why they're sometimes called the modern sabre-toothed tiger. They have enormous teeth!

After the teenagers, we went to visit the babies - only 25 days old! The little guys are all being hand-raised, so they have to be bottle-fed four times a day. With four in this litter, that's more than 480 bottles fed in the first month. Like human babies, these guys need to eat all the time, so their caretakers have to get up at all hours to keep them fed. (Unlike human babies, they also need help pooping. After each bottle, they have to rub their bottoms with damp cloths and clean up the mess. This is hard work!)

With full tummies, the cubs were placed on their foam rubber "gymnasium" to stumble around and chew on each other. A little pile of Clouded leopard fur - how cute! They mewed at each other and did little fumbling kitten moves. One seemed to suck on its own paw. After a little recreation, they went back in their crates for naptime until their next meal.

We then toured the zoo and saw a few animals we hadn't been able to see in the wild. One, a flat-headed cat, is so endangered that very few people will ever be able to see one. I'd hoped to see a gaur (pronounced gower) since we saw gaur footprints by the camera traps we set in Khao Yai National Park, but the zoo's gaur was hiding in his huge and wooded enclosure. A group of wild macaques were helping themselves to his food, though! (We have wild raccoons and deer at our zoo, so it's kind of funny to see wild monkeys running around a zoo!)

(Click to the next journal to read about our final meeting with WildAid in the afternoon.)

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Photos

Baby Clouded leopard
You just can't find much cuter than this, can you?

I'm holding a Clouded leopard!
After three weeks of talking about wild Clouded leopards, it was amazing to get to hold a gangly teenager at the breeding center!

Sniffed by a Clouded leopard
Wendy and this wild cat got along just fine.

Four mouths to feed
These little 25-day-old cubs have to be bottle fed. That's a lot of bottles!

Don't Worry - I didn't sneak him home
I know from the looks of this photo you might suspect I just popped him in my purse to sneak him home, but that would not be very conservation-oriented, would it?

The rare Flat-headed cat
His head IS pretty flat!