At the Potawatomi Zoo in Indiana, a mama golden retriever has her paws as full as can be these days looking after a huge litter of pups—but half aren’t hers.
The zoo had the unhappy issue of an African painted dog who was a first-time mom and wasn’t displaying the level of care required to raise her litter of 8 pups. The zoo’s canine team knew they had to act fast.
The group wanted to use a surrogate mother, because the African painted dog relies on the social group into which it was born. The Indiana Council for Animal Welfare connected the zoo with a golden retriever named Kassy who just gave birth to a litter of her own.
But even with Kassy’s love and attention, the litter of 8 experienced some cases of failure to thrive, owing to a lack of presence from members of their species. But three individuals were resilient and survived. Due to the delicate nature of baby animals, their names were simply Blue, Red, and Orange—identity codes to various shades on their coats to prevent their caretakers from becoming too attached.
The three will form a new social group in an enclosure next to the one into which they should have been welcomed. Abandoned more or less by their mom, the canine team at the zoo is wary that reintegrating them as pups will cause conflict for the same reason they were abandoned. They will live separately and perhaps reunite in adulthood.
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African painted dogs might be one of the more resilient African animals due to their limited value to poachers and large litter sizes, but because they need tens of thousands of acres to roam and hunt, fragmentation of habitat has caused them to become endangered.
“It has been an emotionally exhausting and challenging journey for the team, but it is the Zoo’s mission to work toward the preservation of wild species,” the zoo said in a press release concerning the pups.
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“Sometimes the journey is smooth and sometimes it takes extraordinary measures. These three healthy, active pups are just the start of this story, and the Zoo hopes to share more positive updates of their milestones in the future.”
Red, Orange, and Blue are thriving under Kassy’s care and are now 11 weeks old. They will hopefully live on to produce pups of their own that may return someday to Africa, but in the meanwhile their early struggles present critical lessons to zoo visitors on the delicate nature of wild social structures and how important it is that animals are given their own space.
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