Come along to the bull elephant presentation and watch how our zoo keepers work with male elephant Putra Mas to keep his mind and body healthy.
Come along to the bull elephant presentation and watch how our zoo keepers work with male elephant Putra Mas to keep his mind and body healthy.
In the wild, male elephants range across the forest alone or in bachelor herds, at Perth Zoo we emulate this and that is why Putra Mas has his very own bachelor pad! His wild cousins spend their days testing their strength, ingenuity and curiosity on trees, boulders or other strong male elephants. At Perth Zoo, we ensure we give our boy all the stimulation, exercise and equipment he needs to keep his mind and body healthy and occupied.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Hi guys, my name is Kirsty Carey I'm one of the Senior Elephant Keepers here at Perth Zoo. What we've got here is our male elephant Putra Mas he is thirty years of age and he weighs about 4.6 ton now, he could get up to about 60 ton once fully grown.
We do lots of different activities with him. We take him for swims, we do baths with him, we even do fun activities like painting and soccer. So we're always coming up with something new to keep him mentally and also physically fit while he was here at Perth Zoo. Now he does have two other females here at the Zoo but they are housed separately. So our male elephant he lives on his own. Now out in the wild male elephants will either form a bachelor herd or become solitary and we've just duplicated that in the zoo environment. So he doesn't miss out on much he gets a lot of the activities that the females get and he spends a lot of time when the keepers as well. Quite often you hear him calling out for the keepers to come over and do something fun with him. "sit up straight good boy. Sit up straight good boy big man good boy".
Now our male is a very important Bull, his genetics are very important within the Australasian region. Now he has been participating in the breeding program, he has had a calf in Melbourne Zoo and also in Dubbo in New South Wales, so he's hopefully going to have more young in the future but let's see what the future holds.