Odisha has a history of wildlife conservation and hand rearing of wild animals. Beginning from Khairi, the tiger cub that stayed with human parents until it’s last days to lion cub Barsha who is being hand reared by Prashanta Gouda, the animal keeper in The Nandankanan Zoological Park. The cub Barsha was abandoned by her mother Bijli, a first time mother.
“We waited for the mother lion to feed Colostrum but no such activity happened. We thereafter tranquillised the mother and tried for the forced nibbling of colostrum. But we could manage a very small quantity. Around 20-30 ML only. Following which we decided to go for hand rearing of the cubs,” informed the Deputy Director of Nandankanan, Mr. Sanjeev Kumar.
Nervous, the zoo administration decided to take the matter into their own hands and hand rear the two cubs. However, the male cub could not survive. The female cub which was named Barsha, fought and lived and turned six months in January. However, the challenges were many.
Talking about the challenges, he added,” She stopped paying attention to the two live cubs and two days later she birthed a dead cub. Maybe thats the reason she wasn’t able to tend to them.
Also because of existing Covid scare, we took all precautions and avoided human interference so as to avoid cross transmission.”
Prasanta Gowda who is often seen playing and cuddling with the lion cub, is an expert and that’s why he was handed over the job of nurturing the lion cub.
“He took it in a very positive and challenging way. We consulted various vets from other zoos and also our internal team. We advised him to feed the cub in every two hours including at night. We started with 20 ML and slowly the quantity was increased and frequency reduced. But it was not gaining the required body weight we decided to reconstitute the formula for the specific feline species,” he mentioned.
The milk was difficult to arrange and took efforts by the zoo administration and the forest officials and was secured from outside the state for the lion cub. The reconstituted milk is also almost three times more expensive than the normal canine milk. However, it contained more Omega-fatty acid which would help in the growth of the feline species.
Gowda was the only handler so as to avoid cross transmission and also not the hamper the bond that was created between the cub and the handler.
The Deputy Director also said that there were some heath problems that arose but they were solved by the intervention of veterinary experts.
“In this exercise we were not only able to save the life of the cub but also give it a healthy and fruitful life. We also have learnt a lot of things from it and this will definitely help us in the future to prepare training materials and SOPs for hand rearing of Asiatic lions,” he concluded.
The six month old was left in a larger enclosure after she turned six months in January.
