Animal enrichment at ZooMontana strives to develop strategies and activities to enhance the animals' living conditions and
encourage appropriate or beneficial behaviors, such that both the quality and length
of the animals' lives are maximized while they are in the zoo's care.
ZooMontana has scheduled enrichments at regular times on Saturday starting at 11 so that our visitors
can watch the animals and learn from the enrichment activities. Call the zoo for specific enrichment times.
The zoo uses several different methods of enrichment: scent, food, object and training. The scheduled
enrichments at the zoo will be scent, food or object.
Scent
The sense of smell is incredibly important to any animal. Scents introduced into an animal's environment
can cause excitement or territorial behaviors like rubbing and scent marking. Some examples of the scents
that the keepers use would be perfume, bedding from other animals and food scents.
Food
To encourage the natural foraging behavior in animals, food is used for enrichment activity. It could be
foods that are special favorites of the animals hidden in something unexpected or hard to reach places,
new foods that they haven't encountered before or that has an interesting texture. The keepers have used peanut butter
and live fish for the otters, blood popsicles for the wolverine, rib cages from wild game for the tigers and grapes for the red pandas.
Object
Unusual objects or favorite objects can cause the animals to display many different types of behaviors. One of our Siberian tigers loves
pumpkins, not so much to eat, but to tear apart. The zoo's male Siberian tiger loves plastic...plastic barrels, plastic spools, he
can play for hours with these favorite toys. The wolves enjoy burlap sacks, but don't like boxes. A cold winter day can give our
mink one of her favorite playthings, a pool full of snow brought into her exhibit.
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