00:03Izu's a great guy. He's five years old going on six this October. He's one of those cats that's
00:09not too aggressive and not too friendly. He's always the same all the time.
00:20The girls really love him. Oftentimes when we first let them out in the morning,
00:25Mina will kind of tackle him and Oshana will come and tag-team behind him and
00:30then he'll chase them for a little while and eventually though he is a proud
00:35guy and he'll break off with that and lay in the Sun and take in the morning.
00:41Izu and five other individual lions including Mina and Oshana here came
00:46directly from South Africa where they had been hand reared. They were brought here
00:50on bottles and this allowed us in the United States to open our gene pool up
00:55with new stock. He's fathered four litters comprising of 12 individuals. As the
01:03first batch they would like to jump on him and pull on his mane and he was so
01:09tolerant of that. It was just so fun watching what a great time those kids
01:15had with him and that he had with them. Izu really loves his bones. He gets bones
01:21two times a week and he absolutely loves boxes and that's his favorite toy over
01:29anything else. One of my favorite things about working with Izu is in the morning
01:34when he comes off exhibit he makes direct eye contact with you and gives you a
01:39morning greeting. And that's just the best way to start your day.
01:52We're out at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park celebrating our Lions ninth birthday. We
01:57have cake and cardboard animals to play with. They should be busy for the rest of
02:00the day. When they first came out the door Izu bolted out heading to the first
02:06thing he could see. We have three cakes positioned throughout the exhibit. Of
02:11course they're going to take food before they'll go for anything else so he's the
02:14first cake he went to he made a beeline for it. The girls followed right behind
02:18saw the cake on the left went for that one. Some of them went up onto the rock by
02:23the glass for the presents that were up there. And then they've just been since
02:27tearing into those cakes and licking them down and breaking them apart and
02:30having a blast. Cakes are made up of pretty much everything a lion likes. All
02:36different forms of meat that we offer them here at the park. There's beef shank,
02:39beef hearts, there's bones, ribs, chicken broth, chicken pieces, everything that they
02:46like. It's basically a meat cake. The animals were created by Dave Cuthbert and his
02:51team of volunteers. We really appreciate those. They went way over the top to build
02:56these animals. They're large, the biggest ones we've ever had, and the most we've
02:59ever had. So they're all over the place. The animals have a variety of choices to
03:03attack. Well, lions are competitive feeders. As most people know when they
03:09get into a kill they all want to fight for their share, the lion's share. So
03:14when they did get into the one cake that had three femurs into it, the two
03:18girls were kind of a little tug of war over that until they're going to be able to
03:21break that apart. That is pretty much just like a kill would be in the wild. It's one
03:26one thing with multiple bones in it, so there might be a little fighting over
03:30that.
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