Panda Updates – Friday, October 13

I think we’re going to have to pull out some of the tricks we have up our sleeves to entice the twins to eat sweet potato. Sometimes, simply always offering a piece of sweet potato will eventually lead a cub to further investigate the new orange item and then eventually develop a liking for it. But so far the twins have been completely uninterested in the addition to their diets. Over the years we have developed an arsenal of approaches to get the cubs to start eating sweet potato. One fail-safe method is covering a piece of sweet potato with banana mush (which is way sweeter but not as healthy). After a few days of doing this we can start to reduce the amount of banana mush until the cubs have adjusted to the taste of pure, unaltered sweet potato (I don’t blame them; the only way I’ll eat sweet potatoes is in a souffle!). If this doesn’t work, offering tiny pieces of sweet potato with a biscuit (and getting them to take both items in their mouth at once) will also do the trick. Over time we offer bigger and bigger pieces of sweet potato until they develop that acquired taste.
Jen W.
Keeper III, Mammals