From the zoo's website: The male and female were donated by Kobe City Oji Zoo to Woodland Park Zoo in 1992 and produced three offspring through 1997.
Woodland Park Zoo will have a pair of cheetahs in this exhibit (as of May 2014) for anywhere from 6-18 months. With the successful breeding of cats in recent years (tigers, lions, jaguars, snow leopards and ocelots) there is the hope that the cheetahs will also produce offspring during their time at the zoo. It will be a shock for me to see them in this enclosure, as it has held Japanese serows for as long as I can remember.
I have no idea what will happen with the serow, and I'm guessing that yet another rarity will be phased out of American zoos as there are very few of the animals anywhere on the continent. The exhibit is quite nicely designed for cheetahs although the grassy hill that the serow are sitting on in the photo allows the possibility that the cats will be out of sight of visitors. Hotwire could be utilized to section off the back of the enclosure, but I'm frankly rather shocked that a zoo that for the most part has been extremely specific in terms of placing species in zoogeographic regions would have cheetahs amongst red pandas, Asian cranes and assorted waterfowl. The placement of the big cats is outright bizarre! If the cheetahs are going to only be a temporary addition to the zoo (6-18 months) it would have been neat to place them in the current warthog enclosure and have the pigs loose on the African Savanna in a similar setup as to what occurs at Caldwell Zoo in Texas.
Do you think that the serow will be kept off exhibit for now and re-exhibited if the zoo does decide to move forth with the asian highlands zone, or do you think they will be phased out completely (i.e. moved to a different zoo)? -Speculation mostly, but both are possible ...Or since the cheetahs are temporary, the serow could just be held off exhibit and later moved back.
You would have to email the zoo for a full answer but it would not surprise me to learn that the serow were quite elderly and ready to be phased out regardless of the arrival of the cheetahs.
I don't get the point of temporary exhibits. Does it not create unnecesarry stress for the animals? And it seems a very odd move for a zoo like Woodland Park Zoo that is so nicely arranged otherwise.
