All the meerkats in Munich’s Hellabrunn Zoo died in an accident. As the zoo reported on Friday, the four-animal colony was in a self-dug sleeping cave when the ground gave way and buried them under it. The mongooses could “only have been rescued dead by their animal keepers”. The accident occurred in the night from Wednesday to Thursday.
Hellabrunn has only kept meerkats since 2013; they came to the zoo together with the porcupines, which were housed a little further away, when the zoo presented the then new giraffe savannah. “Our four meerkats Rwanda, Quodo, Quimbele and Rafiki were surprised when the cave collapsed at night and had no chance of getting out of the burrow alive,” said Carsten Zehrer, zoological director in Hellabrunn.
The much-visited meerkat enclosure had only been revised a few years ago. A new soil substrate was used that has proven itself in many other zoos for meerkats in terms of grain size and strength. It is intended to make digging and digging easier for savannah dwellers and to ensure that the soil is as stable as possible. In addition, an underground protection made of stainless steel grids was reinforced to prevent digging too deep. The supply routes for the zookeepers were also underlaid with metal walkways to prevent meerkat caves from accidentally entering.
But none of these precautionary measures helped. “Even if such an accident can happen at any time in the natural habitat of the animals, the African savannah, this complete loss of our meerkats naturally makes the Hellabrunn workforce as well as numerous zoo guests and animal sponsors very sad,” said the zoological director. Hellabrunn will re-examine the soil consistency of the facility before a new group of meerkats will move in “in the foreseeable future”.