DZG meerkats enjoyed a s.s.splendid feast served up inside snake skins.
Upper Primates Keepers saved snake sloughs for the enrichment exercise designed to encourage the meerkats to feed how they would in the wild.
Below and right – Senior Keeper Sam Grove with one of the snake skins.
Ungulates Senior Keeper Jodie Dryden stuffed treats inside the skins which had been frozen for a month to kill any diseases and then thawed out – and captured their natural feeding behaviour on camera.
Jodie said: “The snake skins went down a treat!
“I filled some with cat biscuits inside the skin so the meerkats had to break open the skin to get to them.
“In the wild they would naturally kill a snake if they had the opportunity so they were displaying natural behaviours.
“They got slightly aggressive to the skins, scent marked a lot and continued to smell the skins even when the biscuits where gone.”
Watch how the snake skin supper went down with the meerkats in our short clip below.
