Raw fish, rose petals and frozen mice: feeding time at Dublin Zoo

My Irish Times Food Month appointment at Dublin Zoo is scheduled for a day in early November.

The day before, which is the day after the US goes to the polls, I receive an apologetic email from a zoo representative.

“Unfortunately, there is an issue with tomorrow.”

The issue turns out to be that “we are doing some work with the wolves” which “requires a lot of zookeepers on duty”.

So the day after the world wakes up to the knowledge that the US president-elect will in fact be Donald Trump, the zookeepers do their work with the wolves. I'm not sure who was doing the howling.

The mysterious necessary work with wolves completed, I turn up the following day. I have a busy schedule. My first interviewees are to be Asian lions, followed by Sulawesi crested macaques, and finally, orangutans.

Food Month isn't just about humans. There are a whole lot of animals, birds, reptiles and creeping, crawling creatures living in the middle of the Phoenix Park in our capital city that need feeding, too.

Tearing it apart

Ciarán McMahon has worked at the zoo for 21 years, and has the impressively New York-ish job title of team leader of the West Side Section.

We’re at the Asian lions enclosure. The lions are nowhere to be seen, but their grub is: there’s a raw chicken, what looks like half a pig and haunches of pork scattered across their enclosure.

“We don’t feed the lions every day,” he explains. “They’re fed four times a week. We try to replicate what happens in the wild. So, today, they’ll bulk feed, and then sleep it off for the next 36 hours or so.”

The lions are fed Irish-sourced horsemeat, pork and chicken, all on the bone.

Then the lions – Kyna, Suri, Sita and Kalini – are released from their shelter, and lope off to find their food.

That side of pork is picked up at the speed of a human who hasn’t eaten all night zoning in on a cocktail sausage in a bar.

One lion races off with the hunk of pork and starts tearing it apart. These four lions are all female.

“There’s a male in that enclosure, Kumar, but we haven’t let him out yet,” explains McMahon. “It’s like at home, Dad’d want the biggest chop at the dinner table, if we put all the food out together.”

The zoo spends some €667,000 each year on food.

Of that, 71 per cent is spent on the wonderfully-named “browse”, which is branches with bark and leaves, hay and straw; and on food pellets and supplements. Fruit and vegetables account for 16 per cent of the budget, and fresh meat and fish 13 per cent.

Not totally bananas

“Apart from thinking that primates eat only bananas, the biggest misconception the public have is that they think zoo animals eat inferior quality food. Everything we feed the animals is fit for human consumption.”

McMahon isn’t suggesting he’d serve up a raw chicken for your dinner, but making the point that most of the fruit, vegetables, meat and fish are bought fresh. Apart from the rodents, which arrive frozen and are then thawed for the reptiles.

Possibly the oddest thing consumed at the zoo are the rose leaves from the Netherlands that the two okapis eat; they get through six sackfuls every three weeks.

The troupe of 19 Sulawesi crested macaques are hanging out on an island. They receive what’s called “scatter feeding”; there aren’t set times during the day when they get fed.

Again, this is done to try to replicate how they would eat in the wild.

So, they don’t know they’re about to get loads of carrots, celery, broccoli, turnips, cauliflower, potatoes and melons fired their way. But I do.

The first vegetables go flying over the water, and small furry arms shoot up in the air like those of cricket-players. There are all ages of macaques, and the male head honcho is roughly twice the size of his nearest counterpart. They race around, gathering up the vegetables.

They have a brisk system going.

First, stuff your face with so much food that your cheeks look they’re going to explode. Then grab more food for later; something in one paw, something in the other paw, and – if you’re really enterprising, as one macaque is – a third piece of food in your foot.

“They’ve big cheek pouches on them,” says McMahon. “They’re saving that food to eat later.”

He explains they get very little fruit, because commercially grown fruit has so much sugar in it. A small percentage of what they’ve just been fed is melon.

“You see now, how they go for the melon first?” he says. “It’s just like us humans, in that you want to go for the goodies first.”

Taking it easy

There are four orangutans: Leonie, Riona, Majur and the male, Sibu.

“Come on, Leonie! Good girl!” croons the keeper, banging the bucket of veggies the orangutans are getting for breakfast: lovely clean leeks, celery, halves of beetroot, carrots, chunks of turnips and melon.

It’s the kind of bucket you’d see at a posh farmer’s market. Leonie is first out of the shelter. She’s the matron of the quartet, aged 35.

The orangutans are far more zen than their fellow primates, the macaques. When Sibu finally slowly emerges, he looks like a monk, cloaked in shaggy robes that are in fact his own fur.

Sibu has the most astonishing eyes. Honestly, if a zen monk could be reincarnated as an orangutan, it’s Sibu at Dublin Zoo.

Sibu sits. A keeper throws a chunk of turnip his way. A paw goes up, and he catches it. Then Sibu has a long existential primate zen moment.

He holds up the turnip, and regards it silently. For at least five minutes. Then he slowly eats it. I’ve been watching the whole time. There’s something curiously meditative and restful about it.

If current world events are getting you down, go watch the orangutans eating their food at Dublin Zoo. You’ll feel better for it.

Visit dublinzoo.ie