When babies need extra support

Sometimes mom can’t care for her new baby, and staff must jump in to hand-rear the baby animal during its critical first months or years of life, with the goal of reuniting the baby with its family later on. 

“With first-time moms, we have to be ready for pregnancy complications. Sometimes we have to deal with stillborns, or parents will reject the baby because they don’t know how to raise it, or mom just simply doesn’t produce enough milk to sustain them,” Van Slett explained.

Although human intervention is sometimes necessary to combat naturally high infant mortality rates, Van Slett stressed that “We always prefer babies to be raised by their mothers. We want them to learn natural behaviors without needing much assistance from humans,” she said.

Typically, staff encourage the mother to raise its young over multiple attempts, or they’ll look for surrogate parents from the same species. If all else fails, “hand-rearing is the last resort,” she said.

The Dallas Zoo has intervened a handful of times in recent years, most notably hand-rearing tiger cubs Sumini, Rudi, and Nety, and lion triplets Ilola, Izwi, and Tadala. All of these cubs were born to first-time moms who struggled to produce enough milk to sustain the babies. 

Some animals only need supplemental feeding or a short intervention, like the hoof stock species ibex and gerenuk, who had babies that were partially raised on bottles — or recent emperor tamarin babies who were hand-reared for a month before being reintroduced to mom and dad.

The Zoo coordinates with the Species Survival Plan (SSP) on how to best raise these youngsters. “They typically have detailed information on each species: how much and how often they should be fed, their growth trajectory, what to look out for, and ways to reunite the mom with the baby,” Van Slett said. “The SSP gathers information from zoos throughout the country and pools all of that info together for us all to use as a resource when needed.”

Around-the-clock Kip

A baby gibbon named Kip is a good example of the lengths that staffers have taken to ensure the success of each baby animal born at the Zoo.

“The major difference between Kip and every other baby we’ve cared for is that lesser apes, such as gibbons, need constant care. Someone has to hold him at all times,” Van Slett explained. Even though it’s hard to imagine, “he’s been in someone’s arms 24 hours a day since he was born on August 11.” Van Slett’s staff is logging a ton of overtime. 

In a 24-hour period, Kip is bottle-fed 12 times, or every two hours. In October, he was just starting to eat solid foods like pureed banana, carrot, and sweet potato.

“We acclimate him just like you’d introduce a human baby to solid food,” said Kerri Slifka, curator of nutrition, who oversees the diets for about 2,000 animals across the Dallas Zoo. “Kip has to get used to chewing food and swallowing — it’s a new concept for him,” she said.

Kip’s caregivers take detailed notes throughout the day and communicate with Slifka about his weight, eating habits, and elimination frequency to ensure he’s on the right track.

“The first thing I do in the morning is look at what happened the day before,” Slifka said. Everything is entered into a spreadsheet so Slifka can run calculations and make adjustments as needed.

“If something’s wrong, I get a call immediately,” Slifka said. “Caring for a baby animal is a team effort — it really does take a village.”

Just like mom

Holding a baby gibbon might sound like a fantastic way to spend your day, but staff has to be constantly on their toes to prevent Kip from adopting human behaviors. They treat him like his parents would so he’ll know how to act around other gibbons, which is especially important for a future reintroduction to his family.

“We work really hard to do the right thing,” Van Slett sayid. “Our overall model is ‘What would mom do?’ And we try to replicate that.”

That includes grooming him like a mother gibbon would and resisting the urge to pet him or cradle him like a human infant. “We had shirts made with bits of fabric that he can grab onto,” Van Slett described. “He can hold onto us as if he were holding onto his mom’s fur and build those muscles.”

The team also constructed a miniature jungle gym so that Kip can practice swinging and moving about on his own. See Kip in action.

Challenging, but worth it

With everything that goes into caring for a new baby — not the least of which is staying up all night and constantly worrying about doing the right thing — it’s understandably exhausting. “But it’s really rewarding,” Van Slett said.

Kip has learned to differentiate the voices of his human caregivers. “One of the first times he reached out for me, it melted my heart,” Van Slett said. “Any time we gain trust with an animal, it’s special — it means they’re comfortable here.”

And knowing that Kip is hitting all the milestones for a baby gibbon — according to data points that are collected across all SSP-accredited zoos and aquariums — shows the team that they’re doing the right thing.

“Seeing that he’s staying on track makes us feel successful,” Van Slett said. “We’re going to just keep plugging along until he can be reunited with his parents.”