Destructive Fossa at Frankfurt 31/08/10

Not the greatest of shots, but was keen to capture this Fossa taking it out on the plastic flaps on the door to its indoor area in the Cat House.

As a pedant of punctuation, you should hang your head in shame for that one.

And as a pedant of zoos, a fossa in the Cat House troubles me greatly. It should be in the Madagascar House, or the Small Carnivore House, or the Random Animals House. But not in the Cat House.

Or am I geting things out of perspective?

@Sooty: I actually agree with you in terms of your outrage at the placement of fossas in zoos. Cleveland Zoo curiously has a fossa exhibit in its "Primate, Cat & Aquatics" building alongside many cats, Houston Zoo has a fossa exhibit amongst a long line of cat enclosures, and San Antonio Zoo used to have a fossa exhibit in its "Cats of the World" zone. Are fossas really felines?

Yikes - yes, let's just pretend that didn't happen, eh?

I understand the Fossas were not the original residents here (I think it was originally Clouded Leopards).

The Cat House in Frankfurt Zoo is actually called the Asian Cat Jungle and did indeed use to house clouded leopards in this terrific exhibit (as well as asian lions, sumatran tigers and rusty-spotted cats in the other exhibits). Such a shame that the zoo chooses to get rid of a healthy breeding pair of clouded leopards for fossas instead for no apparant reason...

@sooty mangabey. Unfortuantely, Frankfurt dos not have a Madagascar house, a Small Carnivore House or a Random House, so the best place to keep them in is the Cathouse, which was formely called"Cat-Jungle South-East asia", but they changed the name now into just"Cat-Jungle". The Fossas have now a much bigger and better exhibit than in the Grizmekhouse, where they have lived many years.

I think, only a few Zoos worldwide do have a "Madagascar House".

@Toddy. The apparant reason was to give the fossas much better living conditions. Please inform yourself before posting wrong things.

They may have had a reason for the move but it was not a good one. Instead of keeping a rare species such as clouded leopard and is notoriusly hard to breed in captivity and whose numbers desperately need a boost in the EEP they switch them out with a much more common species that A) isn't from Asia and B) isn't even a cat, thereby ruining the theme and an otherwise very nice house. I also seem to remember them having some breeding success with the clouded leopards before they sent them away.

Oh yeah? Well here is a quote from a post that you made in the thread "Frankfurt Zoo" on 08-07-2008.

So @Tarsius: Please inform yourself before posting wrong things!

While the answer is obviously no, there were a few periods when the Fossa was considered to be an aberrant feline. In 1939 and again in 1995 there were papers published saying that the Fossa really was a cat. Interestingly it is no more a civet than a cat either and is more closely related to mongooses.