Our grounds consist of enclosures which can be connected and separated in different manners. This enables us to provide the animals with more space should there be fewer animals than our amount of enclosures. Furthermore this arrangement allows us to move the animals into different enclosures in order to keep them interested.
The first enclosure you will stumble upon when visiting us is the Tigerhouse, home of Tiger, Kiara, Igor, Boris and Ussuri. While Tiger and Kiara are fine sharing their enclosure with each other, the three male tigers can’t help demanding a territory of their own and thus seperate enclosures. All four enclosures differ a little bit: One contains the pool, another includes natural floor and tree trunks to sharpen the tigers’ claws and the surfaces to lay on are different. Each morning Igor, Boris and Ussuri are released into a different enclosure so they can pick up the scent of the tiger who has „lived“ here yesterday.
The second building is next to our storage and office rooms. Finja and Leo live here together in an enclosure as well as the cougar siblings Pünktchen and Anton. Being our “tiger granny”, Rhani likes to have some peace in an enclosure of her own. However she enjoys the company of the foxes and cougars on each side of her enclosure, as well as lynx Anubis who gets to switch enclosures with the cougars every now and then. The last enclosure included in the second building belongs to, a Japanese macaque who currently lives by her self. Ensuring that Nala won’t feel lonely, the keepers make the effort to play with her a lot.
James‘ enclosure is located near the front of the grounds and has the best view of each and every arriving visitor. If you are interested in learning more about why we have to keep James and his daughter Nala in separate enclosures, please visit their profile pages.
Walking around our grounds by exploring the circular route around our Sanctuary, you will come across our ferret crew, which year-round inhabits two big ferret cages connected by a tunnel.
At the SPEA our primary concern is perpetually the welfare of our animals, which is the reason why we try to keep their lives as pleasant as possible. Our keepers are constantly making an effort to bring a little variety into the animals‘ life and by coming up with new ideas for their entertainment. Apart from toys such as wheels, balls, branches, filled jute sacks and water canisters, Christmas trees have proved to be a great source of entertainment for the animals. On other occasions, we try to construct it a challenge for them to get to their food.
As much as we make an effort of giving them species appropriate keeping, we can‘t fulfill this utopia completely, like providing them with even larger enclosures. Unfortunately renovating and enlarging the enclosure, or even building a more natural habit in the neighboring piece of forrest would be connected with an immense financial expenditure, meaning that we can‘t change this despite our own wishes.
At the moment we have decided to concentrate on maintaining the enclosures as best as we can, seeing as some of them have served their purpose since 1970. Keeping them up and running requires not only a large sum of monetary investments, but also time and effort, so that naturally we are immensely grateful for every donation.