It's the only thing that cools them down.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Maggie Kloza, the lead zoologist of mammals at the Dallas Zoo. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
It’s supposed to get to 105 degrees today. That’s not even the “feels like” temp—that’s the regular temp. Right now I’m working with the tigers, and I looked up what the average temp of Sumatra is. It’s, like, 85, tops. A lot of people are like,. But it’s a lot hotter here than it is where they’re from. And they’ve never been to Sumatra. It’s way past their limit. It’s way past my limit, honestly.
On days like this, we love making bloodsicles. We do it all the time. They love them. We make them whenever we have extra blood. A distributor delivers our diets, which are specifically made for zoo carnivores. They come in 5-pound tubes of meat. I slice them open over a bowl and the blood just drains from it—it’s like the extra blood you’d get when you have packaged steak. Quite a bit comes out. Each cat gets five or six of these tubes, so there’s a significant amount of blood.
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