Meet Lewis and Clark
Posted at 10:32 am December 20, 2005 by Lety Cotero
It’s been one year since we received our North American raccoons at the San Diego Zoo’s Children’s Zoo. Lewis and Clark, named after the famous explorers, are two brothers that got transfered to us shortly after the Rare and Wild show at the Wild Animal Park closed. Both raccoons had already been trained to ” leash,” , ” stand,” and go to their ” mark” (the specific area we want them to go to). This made working with them a lot easier for us!
They are curious and energetic and will walk to most areas of the Children’s Zoo on their leashes with their trainers. This type of training will continue for a while since some areas will still make them a little uncomfortable. We’re hoping they will soon become comfortable with other areas of the Zoo for animal presentations. If they do well, they may soon be ready to travel to television studios for interviews!
Lety Cotero is a keeper at the San Diego Zoo’s Children’s Zoo.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Scroll to the end to leave a comment. Pinging is not allowed.
December 20th, 2005 at 2:03 pm
Raccoons LOVE to explore…so Lewis & Clark are the perfect names for the ” boys” . I raised many raccoons that were abandoned by the their mothers…but I raised them to be free. Built a big cage in the backyard w/a den and a big tree limb to get in to it. There was a huge metal bucket w/rocks in it, and I would go into the forest and collect nuts & berries for them to eat. Then once every few days I would visit the bait shop and get minnows that they could search for in the water. Watching them use those very nibble fingers was so fascinating. They got the minnows every time without even looking! The one thing I really enjoyed about them was their huge vocabulary of sounds for different things. One for ” I’m happy or glad” to see you and then another while hanging on the cage door saying ” I’m hungry” !..and so on. Then in September, after they fattened up, I released them in a nature center. They truly are amazing little creatures to watch. Always into something. Keep up the good work.