A Preliminary Study on Hand Rearing of African Lion Cubs
The summary of hand rearing methods and the analysis of development data of 1 to 102 days old African lion(Panthera leo)cubs can fill the gap of hand rearing data at the older age(50-102 days)and provide more reference for related work.A female Afri-can lion at the Hangzhou Zoo gave birth to four cubs on August 20,2020.The next day,the female lion was found to walk around more.There were signs of abandoning pups.Af-ter the female African lion was isolated,it was found that one of the cubs had been eaten half,so the remaining three pups were taken out for hand rearing.The orphaned cubs were fed with PetAg Esbilac Powder for dogs.Minced meat was added from 47 days of age.The artificial stimulation of defecation was stopped to exercise the abil-ity of spontaneous defecation at 49 days of age.At 55 days old,the first spontaneous defecation was achieved.At 70 days old,the cubs were transferred from the nursery to the cage for rearing.The weight of the three pups increased from 1.35,1.15 and 1.00 kg at the age of 1 day to 15.10,13.60 and 11.10 kg at the age of 102 days.The growth curves were fitted using Logistic,Gompertz and Von Bertalanffy models.The results showed that all of the three models could fit the growth curve of the African lion well.The fitting degrees were 0.999,0.999 and 0.992,respectively.The study showed that Afri-can lion cubs developed well through hand rearing,and hand rearing is a necessary means when mother rearing failed.
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