The Newest, Cutest Baby Animals from the World's Zoos & Aquariums
The Clouded Leopard twins born on June 14th at Point Defiance Zoo are back! These new photos from the zoo show the cubs, which are being hand-raised at just 9 days old. Point Defiance Zoo is one of only three zoos in the country breeding endangered clouded leopards, along with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Zoo & the Nashville Zoo. The birth of the cubs at Point Defiance Zoo brings the total number of cubs born this year in the United States to eight.
Photo credits: Point Defiance Zoo
I’m curious why they aren’t with the mother or are they and the zoo is simply making sure they receive proper nutrition.
Chris-
Clouded leopards are notorious for killing their cubs. Coupled with the difficulty in successfully breeding them (they also tend to kill their mates), clouded leopard cubs are so valuable they are almost always hand-raised. By all rights, this species should be extinct. But they are just too cute to let that happen!
My favorite is the picture of the guy kissing the baby. How sweet. How could you not kiss just a precious angel.
I want this species to live but sometimes I wonder what the heck nature is thinking. Clouded leopards kill their cubs? Pandas find it all but impossible to mate without human intervention? How did they survive this long?
As I have been watching the video, my female cat, who had seven kittens in 2007 (when I found her she was pregnant) is on her tower and seems quite upset as she listens to the kittens crying and screaming on the website. She does this when she hears kittens on TV also.
What juliagoolia said is correct, but it applies only to captive Clouded Leopards. Very little is known about the social life of wild Clouded Leopards. They are endangered because of poaching and habitat loss, not because they kill each other.
and M. Harding – wild pandas know what they are doing. Gao Gao (a wild born panda at the San Diego Zoo) is the only panda in the US to naturally father cubs.
“By all rights, this species should be extinct.”
Not a good thing to say. They breed perfectly well in their own environment if people would stop destroying the forest. They’ve survived for hundreds of thousands of years, after all. It’s only in the unnatural setting of captivity that they have problems. Some species don’t adapt to it as well as others.
Yeah, he just shot his own cuteness factor through the roof.
This is totally correct, except it only applies to captive leopards. Clouded leopards are so elusive that not much is known about their habits in the wild. But they don’t seem to do well under the stress of captivity for breeding. Sometimes the male kills the female he is supposed to be breeding with.
exactly. Things are looking up though. They have had much success lately by bonding a male and female before they are a year old. These two were only 5 days old when they were put together.
A wonderful 26 minute long Smithsonian program is available for viewing online. It’s called ghost cat: saving the clouded leopard
http://www.smithsonianchannel.com/site/sn/show.do?show=130196#video
Thing is nature had it right….If we had left them and their habitat alone, they would be just fine. Thing is we destroy their habitat, reduce their numbers and zoos are just trying to keep the species from going extinct. In zoos, we have to take special measures because it isn’t the wild and they act differently. In the case of animals like cloudeds and pandas, we don’t know much about their behavior because they are so elusive. So it has been a learning curve for many years. What we have learned with cloudeds is hand raise the cubs, pair them young and we get success!!! 🙂
actually add Tanganyika wildlife park to that list! we breed healthy clouded leopard cubs in addition to many other big cats every year that Jack Hannah takes on tour (every year) and educates the public on them!!
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