Friendships between species are something that is always adorable.
This time an unusual friendship, between a family of orangutans and some otters, has captured the love of the internet.
According to the zoo’s spokesman Mathieu Goedefroy, the otters often swim through their enclosure to visit their huge buddies. And even though they love to hang out with dad Ujian (24) and mom Sari (15) too, their son Berani (4) is still their favorite playmate.
The photographs speak for themselves. The orangutan family tends to play by hiding and searching in their habitat.
“Otters hide under big tree trunks or wooden buildings, then Berani, the baby orangutan, comes looking for them. Every now and then they come out to make fun of him. It’s really amazing to see, ” said Mathieu, a zoo keeper.
The spokesman also shared that Pairi Daiza always wanted to enrich the quality of every single creature in the zoo’s life, and letting them interact with other animals is one of their top priorities.
“Our gorillas live together with colobus monkeys, our penguins live with the seals, our kangaroos share an enclosure with pelicans, we have squirrels living with bats, pygmy hippos with pelicans, giraffes with ostriches, Asian elephants with Asian gazelles, zebras with buffalos… and so on,” he said.
The zoo invests heavily in the “enrichment” of its animal enclosures.
“This means that not only size but also the quality of life is very important. One of the ways to do this (aside from hiding food, doing puzzles, organizing brain games, and putting some new swings or records there) is by placing animal species that can interact with each other in the same enclosure, or having them see each other. . ” Mathieu continued.
” Two factors are very important for the well-being of an animal in captivity: the size of his enclosure, but also the quality of his enclosure,” he said. “This means that an animal – and this is, even more, the case of orangutans, with whom humans share 97 percent of their DNA – must be entertained, occupied, challenged, and kept busy mentally, emotionally, and physically at all times.”
Source: today98post.com
