Melbourne Zoo runs an annual competition among its keepers to fund one innovation project. The year predator enrichment won became the Hunting Enrichment program, aimed at three species: Snow Leopards, Sumatran Tigers and African Wild Dogs. The zoo's case was welfare: a routine feeding schedule replaced by something the animals had to hunt for, and the exercise and stimulation that came with it.
Tekt designed and built it — three motor-driven barrels the team came to call the chicken droppers. Speakers and motion sensors around the exhibit play the sounds of prey running through the enclosure, leading the animal from station to station; once a sequence of motion and audio cues has run, a barrel releases up to 1kg of raw meat. A master feeder holds the game logic and drives the other two over a WiFi network, programmable from an Android tablet: audio cues, game sequences, and how long a station must detect motion before the game moves on. One or more barrels can be baited, so the animal does not know where the food is. The units are battery powered, portable, weather resistant and autonomous.
The constraint was smell. An animal that can smell meat through a barrel has already won the game, so the barrels had to seal hermetically. That put tight tolerances between barrel and housing and made the units high-precision and expensive to build. They also had to survive a tiger's claws and jaws.
Installation was scheduled for mid-2018. The zoo paid for part of the engineering time and materials; Tekt carried the rest as a conservation contribution, $31,675 donated. Four systems were built and later refurbished, and the feeders ran for two years across two versions, ending in service with the tigers.
