'When you’re closed you realise how much the animals miss our visitors'
Bosses at Exmoor Zoo say the animals have missed visitors, as they prepare to reopen today.
Last updated 12th Apr 2021
Danny Reynolds, trustee, said: “The animals, really, could do with some enrichment and boy do people bring it.
“It’s only when you’re closed that you realise how much the animals that live in the environment that everybody’s walking around actually enjoy the people who are there and the colours, the noises, all the shouting that goes on – they love it and they can tune out.
“But it hasn’t been around been around and I’ve only got to walk past now and I count six or seven enclosures worth of animals all of them at the glass looking at me intently trying to figure out what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.
“But two or three days into people visiting although the curiosity will be there it’ll just be one eye keeping an eye on what’s going on around them.
“We have quite a range of animals right the way through from insects right the way through to mammals and the things that people love to look at. When you come to a zoo you expect to see certain things.
“The predators are probably the most interesting one of them all.
“They’ve been tracking all the wildlife movements around them but as soon as the people come they will definitely interact with the people.
“The way in which they interact will depend on their own individual characters. We have a black leopard here which has been hand reared.
“He will play and interact with everybody for the first two or three weeks and then he’ll get a little bored with it. He’ll only play maybe first thing in the morning and then he’ll keep an eye on everybody else.
“Other animals who are shy and secretive they’ll move off somewhere but they’ll still be watching.
“It just makes it fairly difficult for the people who visit to find them so we try and set up the environment so the animals can relax, keep an eye on the people and stay entertained and of course when you’re not here we have to do an awful lot more enrichment and the welfare of the animals is actually more difficult whilst there’s nobody here then it is actually when we’ve got visitors in.”
For more about Exmoor Zoo click here