Learn About Our Lions | World Lion Day 2022

Hello everybody and welcome to the Big Cat Sanctuary and Paradise Wildlife Parks live here on World Lion Day. World Lion Day is a fantastic day for zoos, collections all around the world to raise awareness for lions and the issues that they face in the wild and what you can do to support them and today we're with Dan who is going to be training Kasanga and we've also got Jack behind the camera, say hello Jack. Hello. And we're also going to be heading over to Paradise Wildlife Park with One Zoo 3's Aaron and Cassie I believe who are going to be visiting their lions there but today we're going to be doing a training session at the sanctuary today with Kasanga. Dan tell us a little bit about why we train our cats and the benefits. Yeah so what we're doing today with Kasanga is basically a health check so he's going to come over, he's already come over because he's excited he knows it's about to happen. We're going to check all the parts of his body that normally we wouldn't be able to see if he's lying in the middle of his enclosure quite far away so we're going to look at his eyes, look at his teeth, check those paw pads and get him ready to hopefully have blood draws into the future so yeah looking forward to it. Brilliant thank you very much. Dan if you want to get ready and we'll stop Kasanga waiting so eagerly, he's ready to go. So Dan tell the guys at home just sort of how long you've been training Kasanga and sort of how far you've been able to get with him. Yeah probably around two years now and he's come a long way to be fair so when we first started it was just getting used to the basics with the touch which I'll show you first of all and then from there he follows me pretty closely which is really really nice to say you know he will come over because he really enjoys his training and yeah it's gotten to the point now where I've been able to vaccinate him which I'm personally quite proud of and yeah looking forward to the blood draws into the future which will also be very important for him. And the vaccination that's particularly important as you know doing it without anesthetic. Yeah exactly yeah so it minimizes any distress to him it's really quick it was over in about 30 seconds and then yeah then he's vaccinated so it's really important yeah and works very well. And probably also rewarded with a little treat at the end. Yeah so it's all positive reinforcement so we're giving him food as we're doing it so he wants to come over if he didn't want to participate then that would be the end of the session but to be honest I've never had him not want to participate. So I'll show you the touch work to start with which is the kind of the start and the basics of getting him used to the target and then reinforcement afterwards. Eagle-eyed viewers might notice Dan that that target is a little bit smaller than you tend to use. Yes so when I started him I used a bigger target but what I did notice was that he wouldn't really pinpoint his nose right where I wanted it to go so I found using a smaller target made it easier for me to really get him exactly where I needed to be rather than him just kind of brushing his face against the side of the target and yeah he's it's worked well since then. So what I'm doing now is getting a nice look at his eyes, nice look at his teeth as he's coming over nice and close. Kusanga, hold, hold. What's really great to see about this Dan is that it's all on the cat's terms isn't it you know they're not forcing them to do anything they actually quite enjoy participating. They do. You've found a bit of bond with Kusanga. Yeah it's really sweet especially I mean you do you do form a bond with the animals that you train I mean every keeper here looks after all the animals here but they all train one or two cats in particular and the idea behind that is so you can form a slightly closer bond with them so they are more reliable at coming over and then they will be happy to participate and as you say pretty much all the cats on site are so food motivated so they will always come over and yeah it's nice to build that extra bond with them. So I'll go for a paw pad check next yeah so what I'll do is I'll bring him up onto his back legs and the idea for this is to check his paw pads hopefully hold him for a little while so you can get a nice look at that. Kusanga, hold, hold. It was a lovely look at the teeth. Touch, hold, hold. So having them on their back legs like that Dan, what does that give keepers the opportunity to do? Looking at the paws, sorry I'm talking through my whistle here looking through the paws so I'm getting a lowly look at his paw pads here and checking his claws. So what you might notice that I didn't reinforce him for opening his mouth that wasn't the command I was giving him. It was a great way for me to look at his teeth which is very important but we have a separate command for that that we're currently working on and so I don't want to reinforce him to do that every time he goes towards the target because then he might end up biting the target which wouldn't be very good if he ingested this. But yeah it was a good look at his paw pads there nice healthy no cracks to them which is exactly what we're wanting for. So yeah we'll do a couple more holds then we'll walk down to his crotch and I'll show you that side of things. Thank you. Just while Dan is doing his training I think it's a good opportunity to talk about Project Lion which is the sanctuary's new initiative to basically renovate and expand our lion enclosures at the back of the site also raise money for our conservation partners and we're also going to be trying to establish new conservation partners in Asia which is excellent and with the hope of bringing Asiatic lions to the sanctuary which is really exciting. All you need to do is go on our website to find out more just on our website you'll see all about Project Lion there and find ways that you can get involved and help donate and raise some money for the sanctuary. So head online and you'll find find out more there. It'll be so cool to have Asiatic lions. It'll be absolutely amazing. So walking through the crush here. The crush is basically a huge log and I'm going to be planning on building a table for him in the future but it works very well to be able to get him close. So the crush is designed just to get his body closer to the mesh and it means that I can then... contact... pinch him here and this is how you get him to be vaccinated. Contact. Contact. And you can see he really is not worried about it. He's not bothered at all. There's no flinch. He knows the command and it's all based off that amazing relationship that Dan has with the sanctuary. Contact. So you know looking ahead into the future Dan what's the sort of what's the what's the next goal for you with Cassandra? So a couple of different things. I'd love to get him to fully lie down because what you'll see is he's kind of squat. So this here is good but I'd like to get everyone down. Hold. And what would be the benefit of that? Again it's easier working for the blood jaws. Nice and relaxed. There he is. Hold. For those watching at home if you haven't seen already Cassandra and Dan funnily enough both feature in CBBC's Wanzoo 3. You might see Dan in the helping out with some of the projects that we've had at the sanctuary like Karana's move for instance. And if you're looking for something to watch perhaps over the weekend, I highly recommend Wanzoo 3 and we're going to be handing over to Aaron from Wanzoo 3 shortly. Yeah the whole idea behind that is like I say he has been vaccinated through that exact method but get him nice and still nice and relaxed. Like training having relaxed cats is essentially important for them. And actually my biggest task with Cassandra the first time I started training him was just to try and slow him down a little bit because he sort of really got so excited came running across. And so I am slowly starting to slow down with his training which is very beneficial. And yeah check out the Wanzoo 3. Excellent and also on our YouTube channel we do actually have a really really nice video of Dan showing his training with Cassandra. You see how far he's come as well over the time that Dan has been training with him. But I think that's pretty much all from us here. Dan's just giving Cassandra a final little treat to say well done. Thank you very much. And what we'll do the classic all done hand gesture to Cassandra so he knows. And he's got a little chicken drumstick there. So we always finish on a big bit. Yeah this is a good well done. So that pretty much marks it all for us. Happy World Lion Day to everyone and we'll hand over to Aaron and Cassie at Paradise. Aaron. Thank you Dan, Harry and Cassandra down at the sanctuary. Welcome to Paradise Wildlife Park on World Lion Day. I'm Aaron from CBBC's Wanzoo 3 and I'm joined by Cassie who's part of our carnival team here at the zoo. And behind us are our beautiful lions. So Cassie who do we have with us? So over here we've got Kia and she's the oldest lioness that we've got. She's going to be 16 later this year in September. And just behind me here we've got her two daughters. On this side we've got Azula. She was Kia's first daughter from her first litter. And then on the other side we've got Zuri. She was Kia's daughter from her second litter. And these are white lions is that correct? They are white lions. So what's the difference between a white lion and your traditional African lion? So all it is is the coat colour. They are still African lions. They're not a separate subspecies or anything like that. The trait is called leucism. It's an obsessive trait and basically it just means that these lions have long hair. Awesome and I see we've got some meat. What exactly are we going to be doing with the lions this morning? So this morning I'm going to be calling them over for a little bit of a treat. While they're up close it gives me a chance to get a good look at them. I can check them over and make sure that they're all staying healthy. Amazing and this is actually an experience we we do here with the public at the zoo isn't it? We do yes yes. So we offer feed the big cat experiences where pups get to come and do this with us. So this is an amazing experience for them. Well Kia's obviously already interested. She's up and moving around. Of course we do have a fourth lion and probably the most iconic animal that we have here at the zoo. Moto the male. So can you just tell the viewers just a little bit about Moto? Sure yeah so Moto is our biggest cat that we've got here at Paradise Wildlife Park. He weighs over 200 kilos and he has now been with us for probably about 11 to 12 years. He was born at the West Living Safari Park but Awesome. Now one thing that's really really key to what we do for conservation with lions is supporting project out in the field and one of the real key things that we've done over recent years which you can just see here is support lion radio collaring. So this was this is an example of one of the collars that we send out to Africa in particular El Pejeta Reserve in Kenya and they use these collars to help track different prides throughout that reserve to help when it comes to human wildlife coexistence to ensure that there's no conflict between animals and people and these collars are absolutely fantastic for it. They don't harm the lions in any way they just fit around their necks nice and comfortably and like I said the rangers can then use technology to effectively locate the lions and see how the prides are moving around the reserve which again gives really key information and helps people learn more about lion behavior as well. From that we can then conserve the lions in a much better way. All right so we're going to head through to the training zone now. So Kat why do we do training with the lions? So it's all to help with their health care basically and so training has come over to us using positive reinforcement i.e food and it just means that we can sort of get close to them check them over and they spend a lot of their day doing what Moto is doing right now which is sleeping and resting they're doing that in the middle of their enclosure obviously we don't really get a good close look at them and so by doing this kind of training and it helps us with health checks and that kind of thing and with some cats we can take it a step further as well and even administer basic health care so some of our cats are trained for injections so that we can give them their booster vaccinations by hand rather than dart and some of our cats are trained to open their mouths so we can check teeth and gums and stuff like that. Amazing all right we'll head through. So while Cassie's getting set up so the reason that we have white lions here at the zoo it's a bit of a historic thing really they've been with us for a long long time but these are fantastic ambassador species for other lions so we don't breed our white lions the last cubs that we had were the two girls that you see over the back and they're over 10 years old now so it just shows how long it's been since we did breed them the reason why breeding doesn't happen with white lions anymore is effectively because sadly there is a an awful lot of inbreeding that takes place because the gene pool is so small and obviously we don't want to promote that hence why we made the decision to come away from breeding them quite a while ago now so these guys are just simply living their best life at least the best life we're trying to give them here at the zoo and once they do kind of naturally pass away that is when we'll phase out of white lions and move back towards your more traditional African lions and actually hopefully be a part of the breeding program that's being set up for them at the moment so we'll head through. So what I'm going to do is actually blow this whistle before I start feeding them and the reason being is we're trying to teach our lions a recall and just like some people would do with their dogs and the idea is that every time we have some little snacks for them we blow the whistle so they learn the whistle means food and that means we could be anywhere around their habitat and blow the whistle hopefully they would come and find us and so for their day-to-day management that will help us with cleaning and things like that. Obviously Zuri has already realised that we've got some food for her today so she has already appeared and however of course I will blow the whistle anyway just to let the others know too. So it's completely the lion's choice as to whether or not they actually want to get involved in the training and that's the key part of this being positive reinforcement the fact that it's firstly completely their choice as to whether or not they want to get involved or not and also like we said it's basically down to the fact that if they don't actually do what Cassie's hoping they'll do they just simply don't get any meat but if they do then obviously they get the treat and that's where they start to really think about what they need to do in order to get that reinforcement in this case the food. Zuri generally tends to always be the best at it. So first and foremost Cassie's just giving her a bit of a reward for coming over and responding to the whistle that's effectively what that whistle training's for as you can see it's nice and safe so the mesh is set up very differently in this part of the exhibit to the rest of it just so that that way it's nice and safe for the team when it comes to actually doing the feeding. So what are the kind of behaviours we're going to be looking to get from Zuri through this training Cass? So with Zuri we are actually able to get her to stand up against the fence and that way we can check her pads and we can also check the underside of her and so I will ask her to do that whether she will or not is a different story it's quite warm already this morning and so she may be feeling a little bit I think that's a no for that one we'll try again in a minute. So you can really see when they're up close like this just how big their teeth are they've got an incredible biting strength lines it's around a thousand pounds per square inch put that in equivalent to humans it's around 30 to 50. Brilliant and what you can also see just by the way that Zuri's taking the food from Cass is that they actually use their tongue an awful lot ah perfect so she's done the behaviour that Cass wants so now that she's up on her hind legs what it means is that the team or the vet would be able to get a real good check the underside of her body. So say she was part of the breeding program and we were looking to have cubs then it gives you an opportunity to check her teats to see how obviously they're developing for obviously giving birth or if she was in the process of feeding cubs just see and make sure that she's not building up something like mastitis in those teats but also when they're up on the hind legs like this gives you a really good opportunity to check their pads also check their claws as well make sure there's no ingrown nails or anything like that going on so it's really amazing as well just to see how big they are when they get to those hind legs you can imagine her jumping up to take down something like a zebra out in the wild like leaping onto the back of them when you think they look obviously on all fours relatively small compared to us I mean still still big on all fours but it's when they're up on the high legs it's when you really realize just how big lions are we'll give her a sec she's just seeing what the others are up to which is not a lot no I don't think anyone fancies a snack this morning other than Julie so this really is just a snack for her and so it weighs 1.3 kilograms and when she gets her main meals she would get something a lot more substantial than that however her main meals wouldn't be a daily occurrence she would get them every three to four days so we give them a few days break in between their main meals which is a bit more of a natural way for a lion to eat as much as this is really useful for their health care and passing them over it's not going to be particularly stimulating if we gave them all their food this way so to enrich them slightly what we would do is give them what we call a carcass feed so we would give them part of the carcass which means that they have to work a little bit more for their meat and they get the opportunity to strip the meat off of the bones and it just keeps them busy for that little bit longer and there's just a bit more in between for them and so that's how we generally give them the bulk of their diet and these are just the little treats that we use and as you can see because it's been quite a warm morning Zuri hasn't stuck around for the whole of the training session the others haven't even come over but that's fine that's what the whole point of positive reinforcement training is there for at the end of the day it's down to them as to whether or not they want to be involved or not we do like to try and give the animals as much choice as they possibly can when it comes to working with them and what you're seeing now with them just relaxing in the sun this is actually really good lion behavior to see to be honest with you out in the wild they could spend i mean especially in the case of moto you could spend up to 18 hours a day pretty much just sleeping relaxing and that's obviously to conserve energy for when they need to hunt now here in captivity obviously they don't need to hunt but it's still just positive to see that actually they are quite happy and enjoying the beautiful weather let's put it that way awesome all right what we'll do is we'll head back around and just get a closer look at the lions one more time before we finish up so that training that you just saw cast there that is actually something that you can do as a member of the public here at the zoo as part of the experience um generally when it tends to be a bit later during the day the lions are a bit more keen for it but as you can see moto's just having a nice big chill out here in the bark so again something that really helps in terms of the exhibit is the fact that the sun really radiates onto this area so it keeps this area nice and warm for him so uh it's effectively like a giant nice warm bed which is uh which is wonderful for him as you can see he's absolutely loving life so um yeah hopefully that's just given you a bit of an insight into the work we do with the lions here at the zoo and also as we touched upon some of the conservation work we do too but if you want to see a bit more of this then please by all means check out one zoo three on the bbci player right now you can see a load more of the lions a load more of the work that cassie and the team do and of course the conservation work that we support in that as well so that's on the bbci player right now but i hope you enjoy the rest of your day and of course celebrating wild lion day with us and of course our sister park the big cat sanctuary but on behalf of the lions and of course gas thank you very much for joining us and we hope to see you at paradise wildlife park soon