Why do bears die early in zoos?

"Zoos should ask their pets what do you prefer to eat? What foods make you the best in health?" This idea entered the mind of Charles Robbins, professor of wildlife biology at Washington State University and founder of the only research institute in the United States studying bears, when he and graduate student researchers discovered his misconception of the brown bear as eating only salmon.

This happened in a previous study he conducted with his students in Alaska to observe the nutritional behavior of brown bears eating salmon, and the common perception at the time was that grizzly bears eat salmon and sleep and then get up and eat more of it. Instead, they found them eating salmon, wandering And spend hours eating small berries. Robbins and his collaborators discovered that brown bears reach their maximum weight when they ingest a mixture of protein, fat and carbohydrates through salmon and berries.

The study revealed that the unbalanced feeding of sloth bears slowly kills them

Unbalanced food

Robbins has been studying the feeding habits of bears for decades, and he and a group of his graduate students have begun examining the unbalanced diets of bears in zoos.

In a scientific study published in the journal "Scientific Reports" on the diet of giant pandas and bears of various kinds, Charles concluded that bears, like humans, prefer food that mixes meat and plants, and that they need less protein than they are fed in zoos .

Robbins stressed in the press release issued by Washington State University on October 3 that bears are not carnivores like cats and dogs that need a large amount of protein, and pointed out that zoos feed all types of bears with large amounts of protein as if they were It is carnivorous, and that this kills it slowly and leads to its early death compared to its wild counterparts.

In two separate experiments, researchers gave giant bears and sloth bears in different zoos unlimited amounts of different types of food to see their preferences, and their eating habits and preferences were recorded.

Bears' food preferences

In collaboration with researchers from Texas A&M University and the Memphis Zoo, food experiments were conducted on a pair of giant pandas to examine their food choices. The experiments found that giant pandas preferred carbohydrate-rich bamboo cane over protein-rich leaves.

At times, pandas only ate bamboo, 98% of the time, throughout March. The researchers analyzed data from five Chinese zoos that had long-lived giant pandas and found that they prefer food rich in carbohydrates and low in protein.

In other experiments at the Cleveland, Little Rock and San Diego Zoo, sloth bears were given unlimited amounts of avocado, baked sweet potato, whey and apples. The sloth bears chose avocados, which were high in fat (88 percent) and sweet potatoes at 12 percent, and completely ignored the apples.

This proves that sloth bears in zoos prefer a diet rich in fats that contain low amounts of carbohydrates, which is similar to the composition of the diet of their wild counterparts that feed on termites, ants, larvae and eggs.

This is very different from the high-carb foods you eat in the zoo, sloth bears that are native to India live about 17 years in American zoos, which is less than their lifespan in wild environments by about 20 years, and the main cause of their death is liver cancer.

The researchers found a similar pattern in previous polar bear studies, which showed that zoo polar bears typically eat high-protein food but prefer the high-fat diet of wild polar bears if they can afford it.

And polar bears die in zoos 10 years before their life on average, as a result of kidney and liver disease, due to inflammation of these organs resulting from many years of balanced diet.

Bears know better about their food

The current study, along with previous studies, shows that bears in zoos, if given the ability to choose, will prefer foods that are similar or similar to the diet of their wild counterparts. ?

The researchers explain that the bears may have acquired these eating habits later, which allows them to spread in a large number of areas without competing with carnivores in them, and also provides them with more and more food resources instead of eating high-protein meat.?