Mossburn Animal Centre - enhancing the lives of people and animals
south west Scotland

Ignatius
Ignatius is a male iguana and was four years old when he arrived here on the 30th of June 2001. His owner had moved house and his new landlord refused to allow him to build a tank within the house large enough to accomodate Ignatius.

Iguanas are very expensive to keep as their vivarium has to be heated to 90 degrees F in the basking area, and to between 75 and 80 degrees F at night - and although they are herbivores they are partial to a wide range of exotic fruit and vegetables!

Bonnie & Bandit
Bonnie is shown in the photo opposite. Bonnie and Bandit are raccoons and are designated as non indigenous dangerous wild animals - you must have a zoo licence to keep them. In actual fact they are no more dangerous than a fox or badger but they are not native to this country and must not therefore be released into the wild.

Bonnie originally came to Mossburn with her brother Clyde, they had been sold by the unscrupulous owner of a safari park to a member of the public. The safari park has since changed hands! The person who bought Bonnie and Clyde soon realized that they were unable to look after them adequately and gave them to someone else who quickly came to the same conclusion, and that is why they came here.

Ideally they should have gone to the local wildlife park but they had nowhere to put them. Raccoons are like rabbits, very territorial and you can’t put two new ones in with an established group. There would be fighting which at best would end in injury and at worst in death.

Unfortunately Clyde died and left Bonnie on her own, so we acquired Bandit to keep her company. She did not like him at first, but settled down with him after about a week. Raccoons are adorable creatures and have fascinating habits like washing their food before eating it - they use their front feet like hands.

We have a large natural pen for them to live in but it would have been far better for them not to have been born in a country where they could never roam free. We can handle Bonnie and Bandit but only do so when we absolutely have to. As a special treat (or a bribe!) they have a piece of chocolate or some crisps, they are scavengers in the wild, just like foxes, and will eat almost anything though their natural food is fish.

Thomas & Tessa
Thomas and Tessa are that now rare pet, a tortoise. It was a very good day for the world's tortoises when their import was banned as literally thousands of them died in transit to this country. You can now only buy home bred tortoises and they are very expensive.

Thomas was born in 1965, he arrived here on the 29th of March 2003 having just emerged from hibernation. Thomas was a much loved pet and the decision to give him to Mossburn was not an easy one for his owners but as they are now retired they are away from home a lot and felt they were not giving Thomas enough attention. He is a really friendly fellow and adores attention and being hand fed, he is also quite amorous and with that in mind, in July 2005, Tessa came to join Thomas at Mossburn! They have settled well together and Thomas seems to have 'taken' to Tessa very well.

Thomas has a favourite day of the week - Tuesdays, that's when Claire comes in to work and Claire adores Thomas and sits talking to him for hours and feeding him things he likes, rocket salad, mango, papaya, avocado....! Expensive tastes some of our residents have, Thomas however is now fostered by his original owners who make a monthly payment to Mossburn to help with his upkeep. During the summer he and Tessa spend their time in one of the larger rabbit runs which arrangement neither they nor the rabbits mind in the least. When they go into hibernation they have a special tank in the Exotics Room where they can snuggle up together.

Rosie and Jim

Jim

Rosie and Jim
This is Rosie and Jim shortly after their separate arrivals with us in May 2004. Rosie is a bit of a misnomer as both these birds are male, we have no idea how old they are but it is reckoned they were around seven when they arrived with us. They came to us from a local paintballing and go-karting enterprise that had recently changed hands, the new owners not wanting possession of these birds and the previous owners being unable to relocate them. They have cost us a great deal of money to high fence off a suitable enclosure for them and build a shelter. We also had to ask permission of the Kune Kune pigs Willy and Pippa as the only suitable paddock we had available to fence in is their summer one! In fact the pigs are delighted with the new residents as they drop some of their food onto the ground which the pigs happily clear up for them, both species accepting one another and living happily together.

Emus are very, very strong birds. Six men cannot control a fighting emu and their feet are lethal if they make kicking contact - they have the ability to disembowel a person. Transporting them then is not easy and in order to accomplish their relocation with as little stress as possible a vet who is licensed to dart gun was called in. Unfortunatly as the vet did not stay around long enough to see the results of his tranquilising only one of the birds became tranquil enough to handle and was eventually wrapped in chicken wire, loaded into a van and brought here. It took two weeks for an arrangement to be made to collect the second bird and when we all arrived to assist we discovered no vet had been called to attend nor was any plan made to effect a quick, safe and stress free removal of the bird except for the fact it had not been fed for a week in the hope that would quieten it down sufficiently to allow itself to be handled. I don't think I have to go into detail of my opinion of this treatment. To cut a woeful story short Ian Thompson who runs Mossburn Workshop took in the situation and announced that he was going to build a cage there and then, fortunately he had three sheets of galvanised mesh intended for a dog kennel with him and this was utilised to build the cage. On completion the emu was trapped between hand held chain link fencing and the fence of its enclosure, the cage put in place, the fence cut and the emu rolled into the cage which then had a fourth side lowered and tied on and the bird was then able to stand up and be loaded into a horse trailer and brought here. Ian deserves a gold star!

The reunion of the two birds was touching to watch though the second one did remain a little stressed for a day or two. Both birds are now well settled and happy and we have now put a gate from their enclosure into the three acre field next door to give them the freedom to roam about in a larger area. They have been on a diet of corn and bread, the latter in large quantities, we have reduced the amount of bread they get to half a loaf each a day of quality brown bread (it is what I buy for myself) plus as much corn as they want and tinned sweet corn which they love. We are introducing bits of other fruit and vegetables to see what else they like to eat but so far things like apples, pears, cabbage and carrot have been treated with disdain! Rosie and Jim are friendly birds, they like human contact and have shown no signs of aggression at all which is fortunate especially in view of the way they had been treated prior to coming here, evidently emus have a brain the size of a pea which could account for the fact they do not bear grudges!

It is lucky for them that we hold an exemption zoo licence and were able to offer them a home and lucky for us that we now have two such beautiful birds in our care.