Reusable Carcass Box

Our goal with enrichment is to bring animals out of their routine and hopefully do so in a way that highlights their natural abilities. Today let's make a box that helps the animals to exercise their ability and desire to tear up stuff in a productive and challenging way.

I had originally envisioned this box for vultures and other birds of prey to simulate tearing into prey on a regular basis, even for small tidbits for those that aren't free fed, but our only vulture is an admitted coward by my fellow keepers. Thanks Clark.

Image: Pt. Defiance Zoo & Aquarium

The idea for the box is pretty broad and easily adapted to a variety of animals. Any animal that has the ability to tear through paper is applicable here because we can scale the difficulty up and down.

For my prototype I'm using scrap lumber but we'll talk about more durable and more importantly cleanable ways of completing this enrichment later. For ease of setup I chose my box to be 11.5 inches by 11.5 inches, the size of a normal newspaper. That way all I need to do when I want to give this enrichment out again is replace the used, torn up newspaper with a fresh print of the day's news which nobody reads because it's available for free online 12 hours ago on Huffington Post.

Using the box as a template I could then trace the bottom onto a piece of hardboard I found laying around at the operations shop. That's another good point, make friends with these guys; they're not just the ones late in getting to your building's work orders, they're also the ones who will let you borrow tools, take scraps of special materials, or make cuts or assemble stuff on the side for you. Imagine that their day listening to us try and describe what the problem is with our leaking sink being close to how you feel when your non-zoo friends ask about how to get their dog to not eat poop. Where were we? Oh yeah cut out two of those flat pieces because you'll need one for top and bottom.

One piece will stay whole and be screwed to the bottom. The other will have a cutout and become our "picture frame" that holds down the newspaper. You may notice that I actually measured out a 1.5 inch border around the whole thing since I used 2x4 lumber. That was stupid because I'm usually much lazier (clever) and should have just traced the inside of the box frame. Duh.

I just used the circular saw on hand to plunge cut the inside, but a jigsaw would have been safer. It's nicer to have this frame as a single piece because you can give more even pressure to the newspaper pinched underneath and there's less edges exposed to your animals.

That's it for cuts! Now screw the bottom on then flip it over. I made sure to keep the smooth side of the hardboard facing the interior for easier cleaning.

Insert whatever items you want then put on your newspaper and frame. Screw that on. You've basically made a drum with the newspaper as the membrane. You can see that by spacing attachment points evenly around the perimeter of the frame the paper is kept nice and taught and overall is pretty strong AKA challenging to get teeth/beaks/claws purchase on.

I'm just planning on sticking crickets and mealworms in here for Meerkats so using the lumber isn't that big of a deal, but if you want to actually place meat or fruit, anything that gets sticky and yucky, you're going to want a material better adapted for cleaning and sanitizing. For less destructive animals a plastic shoebox or Sterilite container is probably good enough. Cut a piece of acrylic for the frame, use nuts and bolts to attach to the lid and your're good to go. To up the scale on durability go for something like you find at Wildlife Toy Box and get a polypropylene box or pill.

Image: Wildlife Toy Box

If you need to step up to a metal box you'll have to refer above about making friends with your operations department.

Think about the paper products you're going to use for the membrane when sizing your box, or at least the cutout and the frame. I used newspaper because it's a consistently sized material I have a lot of and suitable for the animal I'm enriching. Maybe you have Time magazine subscription which is a little smaller. Maybe you want to use apple boxes which are also standardized for a bushel box.

I'm calling this a carcass box because it helps simulate the act of tearing into a softish body. Go a step further and size the box for a rabbit skin so that rather than just tossing freshly thawed food in for your animals they have to work for it.

If you need naturalistic enrichment, a metal or concrete box easily dresses up as a termite mound or rib cage.

Any way you use it I just hope you find this idea useful find a way to integrate it into your enrichment program! I'll be using it soon for some donors to pick the paper good layers to use then sign the top layer before giving to the animals. I'll probably poke some holes in the surface because it's still pretty novel for the Meerkats as you can see.