Tessa Stripes is our newest animal keeper here at Carolina Tiger Rescue. She studied wildlife biology at Virginia Tech. Before coming to Carolina Tiger Rescue, she interned at Wildlife Safari. Her favorite animals to work with are tigers! She enjoys giving the animals at Carolina Tiger Rescue a safe and appropriate home for them. It’s a hard and dirty job, but she loves it! Her favorite time of year at the rescue is the fall, when all the animals get pumpkins for enrichment!
Keeper Tessa’s Blog 9/12/19
Mila and Riley Tiger have been moved into quarantine and given access to its new expansion!
Karen’s Keep, our quarantine building, helps with more than just quarantining animals when they first arrive. We can also use it when an animal cannot be in their enclosure for other reasons. It has been used to keep better watch over an animal’s recovery after surgery, keep a sick animal out of a storm or, in Mila and Riley’s case, give animals a habitat while their enclosure has work done to it.
We never enter the enclosures with our animals to do our work, because that would be very dangerous. More routine tasks in the enclosures, like cleaning or simply adding a platform, can be done with the animal moved into another section of their enclosure. We call this shifting the animal. In Mila and Riley’s case, their enclosure is having a few of its trees removed to prevent future issues. For equipment and safety purposes, Mila and Riley could not just be shifted during this maintenance. So, they are taking a small vacation in quarantine while we work on their home.
As you may have heard from Dr. Hunter, quarantine has a new outdoor section for the animals! Mila and Riley are the first animals at Carolina Tiger Rescue to use this outdoor area and they are loving it. In this diagram of quarantine, Bays 3 and 4, the light blue sections on the right, would have been Mila and Riley’s shifts during the tree cutting if quarantine were not expanded. Now, they have access to Outdoor Bays 3 and 4, which you can see provides them with a much bigger area! They have more space to chase each other, a new view of the sanctuary, and lots of room to lay in the sun. Mila and Riley are our youngest tigers and boy do they have energy to burn! I’m glad they have plenty of space to enjoy and run while they wait for work on their enclosure to finish.
Animals in quarantine still get all the same treatment and enrichment as the other animals in the sanctuary. To see Mila and Riley play with pumpkin enrichment while in quarantine, visit our videos section.
