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SPECIAL CARE
LIONSROCK provides intensive, specialised care for individual, traumatised big cats with specific needs.
LIONSROCK Big Cat Sanctuary aids big cats overcome their physical and mental traumas, to improve their overall wellbeing and provide them with the best quality of life.
Depending on the individual needs, special care can means:
- Providing intensive lifelong care.
- Rehabilitation.
- Elderly care.
- Care for disabled animals.
- Special treatment plans for mentally; traumatised animals.
- Care for animals in the last phase of their lives.
Important components of this specialised and intensive care are nutrition, enrichment, training and medical checks.
Nutrition
The big cats at LIONSROCK are fed with an average of 20 kilo of meat per animal per week. It mainly comes from cows that were donated to the sanctuary from neighbouring farms. The feeding schedule is adapted to the natural eating habits of the animals in the wild, where they do not catch prey every day and therefore do not eat on a daily basis.
Enrichment
Enrichment is an important tool to promote the natural behaviour of big cats in captivity. Using nutrition, scents and environmental enrichment, we stimulate the animals to play and explore their habitat and new objects. The presentation of new items and smells helps to prevent boredom and improves the overall well-being of the animals. In addition, it gives the traumatised animals more self-confidence which is a very important part of helping them deal with their traumas.
Training
The big cats are trained with the 'positive reinforcement' principle. There are several goals for this training:
- Building trust between animal and animal caretaker.
- Stimulating self-confidence and natural behaviours.
- Supporting medical procedures.
Medical checks
The health of the animals in our sanctuary is monitored on a daily basis by our animal caretakers and volunteers. Among other things, they observe their physical condition and whether an animal behaves differently.
If an animal requires further medical attention, the animal is darted and carefully transported to our on-site veterinarian clinic. This clinic is fully equipped with the necessary medical grade instruments to tackle any emergency that may occur. The animal is tended to by our resident veterinarian, Christine Steyrer. The coupling of both a clinic and veterinarian allows us to act with urgency when the sudden need arises.
