National Zoo’s Clouded Leopard Cubs Reach a New Milestone

Happy News! The now almost three-and-a-half month old clouded leopard cubs born at the conservation and research center of the Smithsonian National Zoological Park have just left the hospital, where they had been hand reared since birth, and moved to their new home at the facility.

The two yet-to-be named cubs are now on an adult diet of chopped up beef and are exploring their new world at the Front Royal, Va., facility.

“They are in a nice enclosure, where they are learning to climb. They have no problem going up. They love to go up. Right now, they go up a large branch and go down a log. Eventually, they will start jumping down,” said JoGayle Howard, a reproductive specialist at the facility.

This enclosure won’t be the final stop for the cubs. The zoo is in the process of raising money to build new enclosures for its growing clouded leopard breeding population.

“They need a lot of height, which our current buildings just can’t provide. We have found that the ability to climb high really deceases their stress levels,” said Howard.

The new habitat development project, which will start construction in about a year, will consist of about nine to 10 separated enclosures, with one for each breeding pair. Besides the need for a lot of height, it turns out that clouded leopards behave aggressively toward any other leopard that they haven’t been exposed to from a very early age.

The new cubs parents, now two-and-a-half year olds Hannibal and Jao Chu, were raised together from the time they were six months old.

For future successful breeding, each new enclosure will be designed to have an indoor area and two outdoor towers about 20 feet tall for a breed pair to climb.

The next step in the breeding program will be for the hand reared cubs- use to human contact- to be able to grow up, raise their own young, and allow keepers access to the new cubs for health checks.

Beyond the breeding program, the zoo is also conducting research studies of these Southeast Asian endangered cats in their native wild habitats to learn more about their natural behaviors.

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