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Why do our animals look so happy?
Good food and a clean home – that’s why!
Think about it. Beef, for example – it’s what’s for dinner (and breakfast and lunch). Our tigers eat the equivalent of 161 steaks per week! A total of 8,395 pounds of meat go down the gullets of our tigers every year. That’s the same weight as two and a half Jaguars…the car, that is.
What about those insects not lucky enough to end up in an episode of Survivor? Turns out that hundreds of thousands of ‘em end up in the mouths of our animals. We serve up 390,000 insects per year including our special mix of crickets, and mealworms. Mmm!
You may be surprised to learn that it also takes a lot of newspaper to keep our animals in a clean and comfortable home – 12,672 pages per year! Newsprint makes excellent bedding because it provides lightweight warmth and animals can easily crumple, shred and scratch it to make their perfect nest, den or burrow.
It also takes a lot of help to keep Connecticut’s Beardsley Zoo clean and beautiful. Over 90 active volunteers donate almost 5,000 hours of their time each year. That’s 13.6 years of hard work in just 365 days!
Good food and a clean home – that’s why!
Think about it. Beef, for example – it’s what’s for dinner (and breakfast and lunch). Our tigers eat the equivalent of 161 steaks per week! A total of 8,395 pounds of meat go down the gullets of our tigers every year. That’s the same weight as two and a half Jaguars…the car, that is.
What about those insects not lucky enough to end up in an episode of Survivor? Turns out that hundreds of thousands of ‘em end up in the mouths of our animals. We serve up 390,000 insects per year including our special mix of crickets, and mealworms. Mmm!
You may be surprised to learn that it also takes a lot of newspaper to keep our animals in a clean and comfortable home – 12,672 pages per year! Newsprint makes excellent bedding because it provides lightweight warmth and animals can easily crumple, shred and scratch it to make their perfect nest, den or burrow.
It also takes a lot of help to keep Connecticut’s Beardsley Zoo clean and beautiful. Over 90 active volunteers donate almost 5,000 hours of their time each year. That’s 13.6 years of hard work in just 365 days!
