As with young children, animals too need proper stimulants to develop their mental and physical capabilities. This is difficult when one is dealing with wild animals – particularly predators – who are cooped up in zoos.

 How are they to develop normally leading a sedentary life? Taking an example from popular infant sensory-stimulating toys for babies, a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Quality Sciences in Rehovot has come up with an invention for wild animal cubs that has won him one of this year’s Kaye Prizes for Innovations and Inventions at the Hebrew University. The prizes are to be awarded Tuesday during the 63d meeting of the university’s Board of Governors.

 Nir Sitvani, 27, a third year animal sciences student at the university, is the only undergraduate to receive a Kaye Prize this year. His prize-winning invention is designed to encourage developmental activity and reduce tension in captive animal cubs by providing them with a kind of “simulated prey” that is meant to give them  stimulants approximating those they would find in nature.
 
 His interactive play object is intended to simulate an antelope. It consists of a barrel which is hung from the top of the animal’s cage. The barrel, which rotates and swings, is wrapped with a coconut fiber rug containing goat urine. A rope holding bones in its ends passes through the open barrel and moves at the pull of the animal cub at each end. The multi stimuli of smell, movement, sight and taste aroused prolonged interest by leopard cubs on which the object was tested at the zoos in Jerusalem and Ramat Gan.

 Sitvani says that as far as he knows there is no other kind of stimulant of this type that has been designed specifically for the developmental encouragement of young animal cubs. He is hopeful of further developing this approach for other captive animals as well. Nir has a web page with photos and a video of leopards at play.