Elephant Eating Flowers - Around 1990

Blackduiker

The LA Zoo regularly provides rose petals to its gorillas as a snack. They relish them.

Whoa! Looks scary and not that long ago - I was expecting it to be the 60s!

nyala are very fond of roses. yea thta looks very dangerouse for the elephant but you can tell she has done this before. do the elephants at chester hav access to grass or is it a permanant hard stand

Unfortunatly it is just sand at the moment. It used to be concrete I think, and then mud/dirt but it has recently been refurbished with the soft sand it has now. I have heard that they have tried growing grass before, but the soil is all wrong for it.

I think Chester's aim is to extend the paddock at some point to include a grassy paddock, but the question is where. From a planning perspective, it is somewhat 'locked' I think (unless they can relocate Asian Plains).

cant they make a grassy padock on one side of the zoo and walk them down to it each day like whipsnade or arnt they trained ?

I don't know 100% I'm afriad. I think they are trained, but with the number of accidents that happen with contact training etc, maybe they don't want to take the risk. There are many stories of fully-trained elephants turning without any notice, imagine if that happened outside the enclosure .

Wouldn't that be a retrograde step - they've moved away from having contact with the elephants.

Those who haven't visited Chester should realise that the elephant paddock looks nothing like this today. If you stood where this photograph was taken you'd actually be in with them now.

One long-term suggestion to extend the paddock by building a new bridge (to give the elephants access beneath it) and utilising the area currently occupied by the Indian rhinos. It has been suggested it could even extend down to the spectacled bears, obliterating Fruit Bat Forest along the way.

Fingers crossed they will still keep Indian Rhinos if that goes ahead. As for the Fruit Bat Forest, I don't know if it's just because I'm young but it's been there as long as I can remember!

also Jumbolino was African.