Many of the live animals at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History will be temporarily closed off from the public starting Monday August 24. They’ll be on display in their new larger space next year. As ideastream’s Caleigh Wells reports, the move to the new habitat is not without a few challenges.
As part of the museum’s $150 million expansion project, the Perkins Wildlife Center will be closed to visitors while construction takes place nearby. Some of the museum's most popular animals, including Charcoal the coyote and sea otters Lucy and Linus, will move to the museum’s courtyard where they will still be on display.
For 45 years, the Wildlife Center has rescued injured and orphaned native animals that are unable to survive in the wild. The museum’s Director of Wildlife Resources, Harvey Webster, says the design for the new larger center creates a more interactive experience, not just for visitors, but for the animals, too.
They have the ability to have a totally different experience, and a perspective on you..and we think it's a gamechanger for animal enrichment, because it sort of expands on the question that no matter how naturalistic you make an inclosure, it's still an enclosure, so this gives the animals opportunity to get out of the enclosure.
Webster says foxes and bobcats will be able to walk above visitors, and otters will swim alongside guests. He says the animals are already trained for the move next spring to their new homes on the other side of the museum.
So one of the first things we do in training the animals is kennel training. So they're richly rewarded to go into a kennel. We close the door. We give them a snack. And so now when you ask them to kennel, they happily go into the kennel. Our bobcats do that, our foxes do that, our raccoons, our otters do that, all of our mammals do that.
Webster doesn't believe the move will be traumatic for the animals, but their new, bigger habitats might be a bit more of a shock. But he says the relationships between the animals and their handlers should provide enough familiarity to make them feel at home.
