OAKLAND, Calif. (KGO) — Briar, a small male mountain lion, is getting used to his new temporary home at the Oakland Zoo.
The four to five-week-old cub was found alone in El Dorado County on Thursday and taken to the zoo on Monday.
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“He’s doing great, very playful, very engaged,” said Alex Herman, Vice President of veterinary services at the Oakland Zoo Conservation Society of California. “They looked for his mom all weekend, so they held him so he wouldn’t get hurt. But [The California Department of Fish and Wildlife] put out camera traps all weekend long to see if mom would come back to retrieve him. She did not.”
Briar will stay at the Oakland Zoo until he’s healthy enough and a forever home is found for him. That will likely be in another facility, Herman said. Since he’s so young and lacks survival skills, the zoo says he can’t return to the wild.
“He’s too young to be on his own,” Herman said. “Normally, they stay with the mom till they’re about a year and a half or two years old. So you can imagine, at four to five weeks, not even four pounds, he would have no ability to survive at all.”
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The Bay Area’s last remaining African elephant, Osh, will be moving from the Oakland Zoo to a Tennessee sanctuary in the fall.
Briar is the 27th mountain lion rescued through the zoo’s Bay Area Cougar Action Team.
“I think these guys are our iconic alpha predator here in the state of California,” Herman said. “They’re kind of our tiger. So I think recognizing all the hard work that we need to do so that we can live our human lives in our homes, driving cars around the state. But how do we coexist with them, so that their population doesn’t plunge and they don’t become endangered.”
The Oakland Zoo will post updates about Briar on their social media pages if you want to follow him.
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