By Kim Rahn
Staff Reporter
Animals at the zoo in Seoul Grand Park will be put on a diet to prevent obesity.
The management office of the zoo in Gyeonggi Province, one of the world's top 10 zoos with 3,000 animals covering 350 species, said Monday it would implement the new diet next month by reducing or changing the feed currently given.
``We have fed the animals highly nutritive foods since 1998, and many of the animals have become fat. So we have decided to change the diet,'' an official of the park said.
Many of the animals in the zoo, living in a limited space, weigh more than their counterparts in the wild. ``Fat animals cannot move fast and their fertility decreases,'' he said.
Official said they would reduce the amount of processed, assorted feed but increase that of unprocessed, natural feed.
For elephants, for example, the zoo will cut the amount of processed feed from the current 7.6 kilograms per day to 4 kilograms.
Another reason for changing the diet is that herbivorous animals eating processed feed tend to get violent, according to the official.
The zoo authority will also provide less meat to carnivorous animals, giving them lean beef, pork and chicken after removing fat.
It used to give 4 kilograms of beef and chicken meat to Siberian tigers each day, but will cut the amount to 3 kilograms.
Predators such as tigers, leopards and pumas will get a live rabbit every Wednesday, which they will have to hunt themselves.
Carnivorous animals will have a ``fast'' day on Fridays when they will not get any meat, which is more in line with the way things would be in their natural habitat.
``Through the measures, we expect the animals to form a habit of hunting as they would do in nature and to exercise more for hunting,'' the official said.
The zoo will also adopt a program to encourage the animals to exercise, which will include putting feed on tree branches instead of on the ground for animals good at climbing trees, such as jaguars, so that they need to move to get the feed.
In March, the zoo hired an animal nutritionist, a first for Korea, to improve its animals' diet.