I know there are threats for carnivores in mixed exhibits, but Iam quite specificly intrested in the rare mixed exhibits with felines. I know that mongooses, bears,others seals and smaler canines are quite oftrn mixed with other species. Are there specific reasons why cats (espically smaller cat species) are rarely mixed at all.
The answer to this is very very simple. Cats (and that includes small cats) are very efficient predators and often have extremely highly strung temperaments and are susceptible stress to boot. What would be the point in causing unnecessary stress to a cat species like a fishing cat for example by housing it with something that it will either view as prey, a competitor or just an enormous irritation ? You can see videos of big cats like tigers and lions being housed with bears in crappy roadside zoos in the United States but those sort of set ups are not encouraged for any decent zoos nowadays.
The combinations "servals & pygmy hippos" as well as "cheetahs & rhinos" were already mentioned in the aforementioned mixed carnivore thread, weren't they? And I agree with @Onychorhynchus; hypercarnivores usually do not make great flatmates.
Lion and tiger moats often have fish, and in Frankfurt there also lived a Chinese softshell turtle. I wonder how and why it got there? Jaguarundi indoor exhibit in Berlin zoo also had fish. Some years ago there was lots of talk about the concept of rotation exhibits, where big cats and other species were rotated in the same enclosures but not at the same time. The idea seems not to have caught on - I wonder why?
Rotating animals through exhibit spaces is discouraged nowadays because of potential zoonotic pathogens. Even though all new animals coming into a zoo are quarantined, the slight chance of the vets missing something, then having it pass on to the rest of the zoo’s collection would be catastrophic. Having separate enclosures for separate species serves as an additional safeguard. For example, the Saint Louis Zoo has a large area called River’s Edge that has many habitats for animals that live near or visit riverine ecosystems, from four different continents. When you enter the area, you go from South America, to Africa, to Asia, and then to North America zones. In the planning stages, they drew up designs for a river that would flow from one end of River’s Edge to the other, through every exhibit, connecting all of them together. But this idea was ultimately scrapped and never implemented, and I’ve been told it was due to pathogen concerns.
I suspect that turtle didn’t last very long if it was sharing with tigers, which are pretty efficient in the water. Lions maybe
Not necessarily zoonotic (that would be a general Public health issue), but interspecific disease transmission is indeed a serious issue in mixed species exhibits.
They would last even less with jaguars as they love water and turtles (both freshwater and occasionally marine) and tortoises form quite a substantial part of their diet in the wild.
