Page 37 - ABILITY Magazine - Avril Lavigne Issue

Hedren: They’re fasted twice a week, and when they do eat, it’s like 15 to 20 pounds per animal. When they’re out in the wild and make a kill, they gorge themselves. But they’re not in the wild here, and we don’t have a situ- ation where they can make their own kill.
Cooper: And do they go to a gym?
Hedren: (laughs) They don’t need exercise; all the muscles are built in. The
only exercise they get in the wild is when they go out on a kill.
Cooper: I’ve always found it so incredible that in the wild, animals exercise for short periods of time during the kill, and the rest of the time they hang out sleeping or having sex.
Hedren: Isn’t that what we’d all like to do?
Cooper: I keep trying to figure out how I can do that.
Hedren: (laughs) People say all the time, “What do you do to get them to exercise?” But they don’t need it. They don’t run for fun. The only animal that I had that ran was a liger, his father was a lion and his mother was a tiger. They have a gigantism gene in them, and grow to be huge.
Martirosyan: A liger. Cute.
Hedren: When Patrick came to live with us from a place in the Chicago area, he was around 600 pounds, a great big guy. The man who had him couldn’t afford to keep him any more. So he came in at 2:30 in the morn- ing, and I went up to the quarantine area to meet him. I went every day to talk to him for the 30 days he was in quarantine. When that time was up, and he could come into the preserve, I put his compound next to my house, so I could continue to sit and talk with him. We became really good friends.
The first time he went into his compound, he looked at the size of it, because apparently in the place where he lived in Illinois, he could only take three steps one way.
Martirosyan: Unpleasant.
Hedren: It was awful, from what I understand. And when I opened the gates for him to come into this three-quarters-of-an-acre compound, his eyes got big, he looked at me, and then turned and ran the length of it, just because he could. It’s the only animal that did that. They’ll run if they’re playing, or if they see something they want. But otherwise, they don’t exercise to keep their beautiful shapes. It’s just in them.
Cooper: Do you know who the next celeb will be at your sunset safari?
Hedren: We haven’t had a meeting about that yet. If you ask them too far in advance, a movie may come up or something else and then they can’t do it. So we generally just book them a month in advance.
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ABILITY 37