Idaho Fall Zoo raises Sid
The Idaho Falls Zoo has been raising a Muller’s grey Gibbon.
“When you come to the zoo, one of the first animals that you’ll notice as you walk through the primate discovery center is Sid, and that’s because he’ll come right up to the glass to you, and the reason for that is obviously because he was hand raised by humans here at the zoo,” said the education curator for the Idaho Falls Zoo, Sunny Katseanes.
Muller’s grey gibbons aren’t supposed to get teeth until they’re twelve to thirteen days old.
However, Sid at the Idaho Falls Zoo, was born with them, something that didn’t go to well with his mother.
“He was also the first son of the parents, and so when he decided to nurse, mom said, I don’t know about these teeth, we’re not going to let you nurse,” said operations manager, Linda Beard.
So the zoo pulled Sid out and used tools to raise him that would closely replicate him being raised by his mother.
“So we bottled raised him with these little tiny bottles. Because he’s a gibbon, he had to learn how to hang on, so we wore this nice little vest.”
Over the course of several months, the zoo had twenty-seven volunteers who would take turns watching Sid. He was accompanied twenty-four seven.
“Every single thing we did with Sid we did it right in front of his parents, so they were able to watch him grow.”
The older Sid grew, the more tactics the zoo would use to help him detach from being in the care of humans.
“So instead of holding him and giving him a bottle, we started doing things, inventive little things, where we’d actually reach the bottle into him.”
Growing up with all of the attention made the transition back with his family a little harder for Sid.
“It was a difficult transition, but we just held strong, we kept working with him and it worked out well, he’s doing really really well.”
Now Sid is living full time with his family and has traded his bottle for a biscuit- which supplies all of the nutrients he needs for a day.
To catch more of Sid hanging around, visit the Idaho Falls Zoo.
