Singapore Zoo Singapore Zoo news 2007-2008

Since the old thread's been closed i've started a new one.

The Singapore Zoo has just received a nice USD20,000 donation by a local Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) company for research into the use of TCM in veterinary medicine.

The Zoo has been a pioneer in this area, with one of our vets being a certified human TCM practitioner. He's successfully treated elephants, komodo dragons, snakes, horses and many other species with acupuncture.

Chinese herbs have also been used to treat a multitude of species, including constipation in orangutans and respiratory problems in horses.

All the techniques and dosages were painstakingly worked out throughout the years by the vet through careful trials to suit each species. Hopefully the research can be published and treating animals with TCM will gain greater international acceptance.

 

Don't chinese medicines use parts of tigers and rhino horns? I'm not suggesing the ones at the zoo use them.

 

You're quite right Jonathan. That was traditional practice. Modern practitioners of Chinese medicine frown on such items, opting for largely herb-based remedies. Part of the reason they abandoned such animal parts was to gain greater credibility and acceptance for Chinese medicine internationally. In any case, the Zoo only uses herbal remedies, no animal parts are prescribed.

 

I hope i'm still on the topic here, Does the zoo breed clouded leopards? The only 2 zoos that I know have done it are The aspinal parks and San diego zoo. I think the male and female have to be kept together when they are young to stop fighting during mating. I heard a lot of females died that way.

I read this info in a book I purchased from Sandiego zoo. Does sinagopaore zoo have a book?

 

singapore is a great zoo, from photos, but i am still a little confusd zooish, it is tun as 1 zoo with night safari, or are they run separte, stupid qn, but i need to get it straight in my head

 

They are two separate facilities, although all the exhibits are on the same piece of land. You can go into the zoo during the day, or alternatively, go into the Night zoo at night. Most (all?) of the night zoo exhibits cannot be seen from the zoo, so in effect, it is two separate zoos, although they ajoin each other.

 

We've tried breeding the clouded leopards naturally for a few years now but no success yet. AI was attempted once and was not successful also, but will be used in the future when the technique is perfected further by local vets.

The last comprehensive book which the zoo produced was years ago. Now they have online yearbooks available for download from the website. But the yearbooks are scant on animal info, covering mostly business/development aspects.

ZooPro you're right, Singapore Zoo and the Night Safari are separate parks. They sit on adjacent pieces of land (28 hectares for the Zoo, 40 hectares for Night Safari), but are joined by an internal service road and share facilities like hospital and central kitchen. The Night Safari opens only at night, from 7.30pm to midnight, in the day it is not accessible to the public. The 2 parks have separate visitor entrances.

 

I have seen pictures of the babirusa at the zoo in the gallery. How many are there? Have they bred? What other pigs are there at the zoo? Not many zoos are sucessful in breeding Babirusa. Chester has had them for nearly 10 years now without sucess.

 

We currently have 17 babirusas, 9 females and 8 males. They have bred really well so the males have been separated from the females to stop breeding.

Other than babirusas, we only have bearded pigs and desert warthogs.

 

zooish on the clouded leopards - we talked about the bornean now-its-own-species type being kept at the zoo along with some of the regular kind. i think you said this animal was thus sent to that safari park we always hear about that keeps the same type.

my question is - do you have any pics of the animal? i would be very interested to see them. their seems just one or two photos of this new species floating around the net..

 

I remembered having a picture of the male bornean clouded leopard but i lost it when i got a new computer.

I have no idea where he is now, probably in Indonesia where there should be more of his species in captivity. He supposedly was donated to Singapore in the late 90s by some tribal chief from borneo who kept him as a pet.

 

I recently got a new book on mammals of SE Asia. It has a picture of a bornean clouded leopard on the front. or at leats I think it is a bornean clouded leopard.....

Does the singapore zoo have any birds of paradise or Hornbills?

 

i have been looking for that book for ages, its out of stock everywhere in australia!

 

zooboy name the book's proper title and author - i might know where to find it...

 

Try on Amazon.

 

kool pat, where can i find it mate chgeers

 

No birds of paradise, only a couple of hornbills. The Zoo and Jurong BirdPark are run by the same organisation so the 2 parks have an agreement to not cannibalize each other. So the BirdPark sticks to birds, while the Zoo sticks mainly to mammals and reptiles, with a few token birds species.

 

Any news Zooish at singapore? I love hearing about new species/births enclosures etc.

 

Sun bears

G'day Zooish. I was just looking at the photo of the sun bear's new exhibit, where is it situated and is it a mixed species exhibit?