Hey everybody, It's Brittany at Big Cat
Rescue in Tampa, Florida.
And I am here with another home tour for
you.
Today I want to show you Cyrus caracal
and we will check out his entire
enclosure.
For those of you that are new to us,
we get a lot of people asking how big
are their enclosures? And
you know they need more space and things
like that. We do try to give them as much
space as possible.
He's currently hiding under his platform
over there, so hopefully he'll
come say hello. But the sad truth is that
they are in captivity,
so unfortunately, they can never go free.
They were born and raised in cages.
His neighbor is Miss Chaos right there.
We'll do her tour
at another time, but this is where we're
gonna start.
Chaos and Cyrus came to us after having
been housed
with dozens of other cats for
breeding for the pet industry.
Hi sir, hi Cyrus,
hi cute boy, do you want to give the tour
with us?
He's like sure, welcome to my home.
And so Cyrus and Chaos came to us with
another serval named Zucari.
And yeah, we were told that Cyrus and
Chaos were,
they were trying to breed them for the
pet industry. So we did make sure they
were spayed and neutered and then we did
put them back together.
And for a very short while it worked out,
but ultimately we could tell Chaos
absolutely did not want to have to share
space with
Cyrus anymore. So what we've done
is, we put them in an enclosure
where they are near each other, but not
together.
So you see this little doorway here. You
see that both guillotine doors are down
and locked.
Cyrus has one side of it and we'll
do his tour today.
And then Miss Chaos has the other side.
So you can see he has all these
beautiful bird-of-paradise plants. He
absolutely loves laying in them
and I just think the flowers just look
so much like his ears.
He really likes this plant, so most of
the time you'll find him over here
under his platform. He does have
a big concrete den here and
this den has a nice little window. So if
we ever needed to peek in on him and see
what's going on in there,
but there's a lot of sand and dirt on
the bottom
so it's cozy and comfy for him. Also
it keeps him cooler in the summer and
warmer in the winter.
He just drapes himself through his flowers,
so we're gonna walk his entire enclosure
and I'll just show you all of his little
details and
we'll stop back on the other side of the
tunnel.
So this is just another view.
And he has a feeding lockout right here.
That is where he knows he will get
breakfast every single day.
There's a concrete slab in there where
we put the food.
There's a water bowl. We raise up the
water bowls because wild cats like to
pee in water.
It helps keep them yeah it helps keep
them
a little more incognito in the wild so
they can't be tracked by predators,
but here in captivity we really want
them to have fresh water
all the time, so we lift it up off the
ground. That way they can't spill it or
play in it or pee in it.
Is that right? Is that right?
All right, so he has this little doorway
here
and I don't know if he'll follow me, but
he can walk himself right through there.
And then he's got this big area out here.
There's a tree stump den, there's a lot
of palmettos. He's got lots of
toys he can roll around. So that's the
doorway he could walk through if he so
chooses.
He also has this big
platform here with a ramp. So he's got
three different levels. He can also lay
under it and the nice cool sand as well
and he has this long tunnel here.
He can walk through that, yet another
guillotine door.
All of these doors can be open and
closed to shift him around. So say we
need to come into this section
and cut back some ferns or
take out a tree stump or something along
those lines, we just shift him far
away from it, make sure he's locked away,
then we can enter and do any kind of
maintenance we need to.
So this is another big concrete den that
he has.
It also has a little peak window so that
we can see what's going on in there.
It's a really good place to look for paw
prints a lot of the time.
So here's another view back
and he's got some more toys up there.
Each one of these bubbles
connected by the doors and tunnels is
anywhere from twelve to eighteen hundred
square feet.
And then they all have multiple sections.
So here's a closer look at one of the
feeding lockouts. He actually doesn't eat
in this particular one,
but we make sure that each section has
a food area and a water area so that if
we are shifting them around for
maintenance, and it might be more than
one day,
we know that they're going to have an
area that'll be really simple for us to
feed and make sure they have water.
We use these ceramic tiles to cover the
water bowl, so that helps keep debris
from falling trees out of it.
So another view back. I think he'll meet
us at the end.
Right here is one of Cyrus's safety
entrances.
So we always have a two-door system
between us and the cats, so
if we did have to go into this section
for maintenance,
we would be able to undo these clips in
this lock,
lock ourselves in this little bubble and
then
go in the interior door. So each section
has a safety entrance
so that each section is always as secure
as humanly possible.
So here's another view back at that
feeding lockout, that den that we saw,
one of his toys
and then this curves back around so we
would walk this
exactly like a cleaner would.
So we're right back to this tunnel and
this door
and here's that same platform we saw
before, just
now we are closer to it
and we're gonna keep going around the
corner.
So another area with a lot of foliage, he
likes to weave in and out of those
palmettos.
He has a den up here. This is the one he
likes to spend the most time in
when it's not raining. When it is raining,
he does use the concrete dens.
Here is the other safety entrance. This
entrance is, there's one
entrance to either side of the bubbles,
so
you can see the exterior, then there's
the door
into that bubble, or we could choose the
door
into this bubble.
Here is his official feeding lockout and
the way
that you know it's his official one is
it has this chicken wire around it.
We do put that around their feeding
lockouts because we want to make sure
that they never feel threatened by
vultures or large birds,
anything that's going to come and try to
steal their food. You showing them how
you like it in there?
So the other huge advantage to a feeding
lockout is that it is a small space.
So I could actually very easily close
him in there
and our vet could take a really close
look at him.
You could put flea medication on him, you
could potentially give him a vaccine,
or we would be able to put a transport
cage
right on the other side of the door and
then he'd just walk into it and we can
carry him wherever we need to
take him. So that is a huge purpose of
the feeding lockout besides just feeding
the cats, of course.
So we are right back over here where his
beautiful birds-of-paradise are. Here's
another view
of his den.
You hanging out in your favorite corner?
Thanks for letting us see your house, Bud.
You were a very gracious host.
Yes, you were, very gracious host.
If you do have any questions about the
way our enclosures are
built or would like to see more of them,
just visit bigcatrescue.org/
cages. All right, Bud,
say bye-bye.
he's like not today, say bye.-EDITED-DAL-DQ